I was asked if I had heard of the “Aquatic Ape Theory/Hypothesis”?

The aquatic apes theory/hypothesis (AAH) to me is more like the stuff of unsupported myth like: humans come from or were created by aliens, intelligent design, creationism, and not proven evolution. Standard evolutionary models suggest and supporting evidence shows the different features that make humans different appeared at separate times and for many different reasons. The AAH argues they all occurred because our ancestors decided to live in or near water.

There are several problems with this bad idea…

Here Are objections to the ridiculous hypothesis listed on RationalWiki:

The first is that convergent evolution predicts adaptations serving similar function, not necessarily similar structure. A platypus bill looks like a duck bill because it solves the precise same problem (sucking bugs out of mud); but the wings of a bat, a bird, and a bumblebee are products of convergent evolution in solving the problem of flight, but are structurally very different. Morgan’s convergent evolution adaptations focus on structure.

The second problem is that evidence provided for the AAH is equally well accounted for by savannah-based adaptations without needing to posit an aquatic phase of human development. Loss of body hair: lower parasite load (early hominids appear to have been disgusting skanks) and maintenance through sexual selection. Furthermore, many aquatic mammals have actually kept their body hair. Several other savannah species have also lost much of their hair including elephants, rhinoceroses, and naked mole rats. Although it is interesting to note that both elephants and rhinoceroses are theorized to have evolved from aquatic ancestors so they may not be the best counter-examples, though the only modern rhinoceros that spends much of its time in the water is the hairy rhinoceros. Diet: the fatty acids for the brain were present in sufficient quantities on the savannah. Diving reflex: terrestrial mammals show this too; there has been insufficient study of other apes to use this as evidence that humans are special in this regard. Body fat: distribution is similar to that of other primates. The quantities seen in present-day humans accord with those seen in domesticated mammals, i.e. we’re quite well fed compared with wild dumb beasts. Humans have relatively more fat below the waist which serves as insulation when wading. Bipedalism: the AAH compares humans to quadrupeds, but we went from quadrupedal locomotion to brachiation; bipedalism follows quite readily from that. Descended larynx: again, speech. The human larynx is not shaped like that of aquatic mammals, and descended larynxes are also seen in dogs, pigs, goats, monkeys and young chimps. Nose shape: again, speech. Speech was rather important in human development, oddly enough. Sebaceous glands: not actually found in aquatic mammals. Appear to be sexually dimorphic (highly active in adolescent human males, scent receptors highly active in adolescent human females). Swimming: humans really aren’t that good at swimming. Dogs and cats do about as well.

A third major problem is there are actual characteristics indicative of aquatic mammals which humans notably lack. Aquatic mammals are testicond and have internal testes to insulate the gonads; humans are not testicond. Aquatic mammals also store large amounts of oxygen in the blood rather than the lungs; a trait lacked by humans. The aquatic ape theory cannot easily explain why these features were maintained after our ancestors supposedly left the water and moved to savannahs. Further, there’s good evidence that many of the traits claimed to fall under the umbrella of the aquatic ape hypothesis evolved at radically different points in human evolutionary history. Fossils from 4.4 million years ago display bipedalism, while still possessing small brains long after, and not evolving sparse body hair until later still. One of the largest problem with the theory is that since the 1960s rather than improving and gathering evidence, the theory has become more nebulous and vague. Rather than some specific aquatic phase modern Aquatic Ape theorists cite anything from fresh water millions of years ago, salt water habitation more recently, several different aquatic phases or a general proximity to water to a greater degree than other apes. Incidentally other apes and even some monkeys sometimes gather food from water and may stand bipedally to do this. There are also anti-science objections lodged against the creation of the hypothesis because Morgan had the idea first and then simply found differences between humans and other apes and composed ad hoc reasons associated with water. One could cherry pick data for many such pet theories without any merit behind them, while making them sound good on paper. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Aquatic_ape_hypothesis

Aquatic Ape Theory/Hypothesis? As Always, Just Pseudoscience.

Debunking Aquatic Ape Theory

Aquatic Ape Theory (AAT): Sink or Swim?

How the Aquatic Ape Theory Keeps Floating On | Motherboard

Why anthropologists don’t accept the Aquatic Ape Theory · john hawks

Aquatic Ape ‘theory’… again. | Richard Dawkins Foundation

Sorry David Attenborough, we didn’t evolve from ‘aquatic apes

Aquatic apes are the stuff of creationism, not evolution

The Aquatic Ape Theory – Skeptoid

Aquatic ape Hypothesis

“The aquatic ape hypothesis (AAH), also referred to as aquatic ape theory (AAT) or the waterside hypothesis of human evolution, is highly controversial, and has been criticized as pseudoscience. The hypothesis is thought to be more popular with the lay public than with scientists; in the scientific literature, it is generally ignored by anthropologists, as it postulates that the ancestors of modern humans took a divergent evolutionary pathway from the other great apes by becoming adapted to a more aquatic habitat.” ref

“The hypothesis was initially proposed by the marine biologist Alister Hardy in 1960, who argued that a branch of apes was forced by competition over terrestrial habitats to hunt for food such as shellfish on the seashore and sea bed, leading to adaptations that explained distinctive characteristics of modern humans such as functional hairlessness and bipedalism. Elaine Morgan‘s 1990 book on the hypothesis, Scars of Evolution, received some favorable reviews but was subject to criticism from the anthropologist John Langdon in 1997, who characterized it as an “umbrella hypothesis” with inconsistencies that were unresolved and a claim to parsimony that was false.” ref

“In 1942 the German pathologist Max Westenhöfer (1871–1957) discussed various human characteristics (hairlessness, subcutaneous fat, the regression of the olfactory organ, webbed fingers, direction of the body hair etc.) that could have derived from an aquatic past, quoting several other authors who had made similar speculations. As he did not believe human beings were apes, he believed this might have been during the Cretaceous, contrary to what is possible given the geologic and evolutionary biology evidence available at the time. He stated: “The postulation of an aquatic mode of life during an early stage of human evolution is a tenable hypothesis, for which further inquiry may produce additional supporting evidence.” He later abandoned the concept.” ref

“Independently of Westenhöfer’s writings, the marine biologist Alister Hardy had since 1930 also hypothesized that humans may have had ancestors more aquatic than previously imagined, although his work, unlike Westenhöfer’s, was rooted in the Darwinian consensus. On the advice of his colleagues, Hardy delayed presenting the hypothesis for approximately thirty years. After he had become a respected academic and knighted for contributions to marine biology, Hardy finally voiced his thoughts in a speech to the British Sub-Aqua Club in Brighton on 5 March 1960. Several national newspapers reported sensational presentations of Hardy’s ideas, which he countered by explaining them more fully in an article in New Scientist on 17 March 1960: “My thesis is that a branch of this primitive ape-stock was forced by competition from life in the trees to feed on the sea-shores and to hunt for food, shellfish, sea-urchins etc., in the shallow waters off the coast.” ref

“The idea was generally ignored by the scientific community after the article was published. Some interest was received, notably from the geographer Carl Sauer whose views on the role of the seashore in human evolution “stimulated tremendous progress in the study of coastal and aquatic adaptations” inside marine archaeology. In 1967, the hypothesis was mentioned in The Naked Ape, a popular book by the zoologist Desmond Morris, who reduced Hardy’s phrase “more aquatic ape-like ancestors” to the bare “aquatic ape”, commenting that “despite its most appealing indirect evidence, the aquatic theory lacks solid support”. While traditional descriptions of ‘savage’ existence identified three common sources of sustenance: gathering of fruit and nuts, fishing, and hunting, in the 1950s, the anthropologist Raymond Dart focused on hunting and gathering as the likely organizing concept of human society in prehistory, and hunting was the focus of the screenwriter Robert Ardrey‘s 1961 best-seller African Genesis.” ref

“Another screenwriter, Elaine Morgan, responded to this focus in her 1972 Descent of Woman, which parodied the conventional picture of “the Tarzanlike figure of the prehominid who came down from the trees, saw a grassland teeming with game, picked up a weapon and became a Mighty Hunter,” and pictured a more peaceful scene of humans by the seashore. She took her lead from a section in Morris’s 1967 book which referred to the possibility of an Aquatic Ape period in evolution, his name for the speculation by the biologist Alister Hardy in 1960. When it aroused no reaction in the academic community, she dropped the feminist criticism and wrote a series of books–The Aquatic Ape (1982), The Scars of Evolution (1990), The Descent of the Child (1994), The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis (1997) and The Naked Darwinist (2008)–which explored the issues in more detail. Books published on the topic since then have avoided the contentious term aquatic and used waterside instead.” ref

“Hardy’s hypothesis as outlined in the New Scientist was: “My thesis is that a branch of this primitive ape-stock was forced by competition from life in the trees to feed on the sea-shores and to hunt for food, shell fish, sea-urchins etc., in the shallow waters off the coast. I suppose that they were forced into the water just as we have seen happen in so many other groups of terrestrial animals. I am imagining this happening in the warmer parts of the world, in the tropical seas where Man could stand being in the water for relatively long periods, that is, several hours at a stretch.” ref

“Hardy argued a number of features of modern humans are characteristic of aquatic adaptations. He pointed to humans’ lack of body hair as being analogous to the same lack seen in whales and hippopotamuses, and noted the layer of subcutaneous fat humans have that Hardy believed other apes lacked, although it has been shown that captive apes with ample access to food have levels of subcutaneous fat similar to humans. Additional features cited by Hardy include the location of the trachea in the throat rather than the nasal cavity, the human propensity for front-facing copulation, tears, and eccrine sweating, though these claimed pieces of evidence have alternative evolutionary adaptationist explanations that do not invoke an aquatic context.” ref

“Hardy additionally posited that bipedalism evolved first as an aid to wading before becoming the usual means of human locomotion, and tool use evolved out of the use of rocks to crack open shellfish. These last arguments were cited by later proponents of AAH as an inspiration for their research programs. Morgan summed up her take on the hypothesis in 2011: “Waterside hypotheses of human evolution assert that selection from wading, swimming and diving and procurement of food from aquatic habitats have significantly affected the evolution of the lineage leading to Homo sapiens as distinct from that leading to Pan.” ref

“The AAH is generally ignored by anthropologists, although it has a following outside academia and has received celebrity endorsement, for example from David Attenborough. Academics who have commented on the aquatic ape hypothesis include categorical opponents (generally members of the community of academic anthropology) who reject almost all of the claims related to the hypothesis. Other academics have argued that the rejection of Hardy and Morgan is partially unfair given that other explanations which suffer from similar problems are not so strongly opposed. A conference devoted to the subject was held at Valkenburg, Netherlands, in 1987.” ref

“Its 22 participants included academic proponents and opponents of the hypothesis and several neutral observers headed by the anthropologist Vernon Reynolds of the University of Oxford. His summary at the end was: “Overall, it will be clear that I do not think it would be correct to designate our early hominid ancestors as ‘aquatic’. But at the same time there does seem to be evidence that not only did they take to water from time to time but that the water (and by this I mean inland lakes and rivers) was a habitat that provided enough extra food to count as an agency for selection.” ref

“The AAH is not accepted as empirically supported by the scholarly community, and has been met with significant skepticism. The Nature editor and paleontologist Henry Gee has argued that the hypothesis has equivalent merit to creationism, and should be similarly dismissed. In a 1997 critique, anthropologist John Langdon considered the AAH under the heading of an “umbrella hypothesis” and argued that the difficulty of ever disproving such a thing meant that although the idea has the appearance of being a parsimonious explanation, it actually was no more powerful an explanation than the null hypothesis that human evolution is not particularly guided by interaction with bodies of water. Langdon argued that however popular the idea was with the public, the “umbrella” nature of the idea means that it cannot serve as a proper scientific hypothesis.” ref

“Langdon also objected to Morgan’s blanket opposition to the “savannah hypothesis” which he took to be the “collective discipline of paleoanthropology”. He observed that some anthropologists had regarded the idea as not worth the trouble of a rebuttal. In addition, the evidence cited by AAH proponents mostly concerned developments in soft tissue anatomy and physiology, whilst paleoanthropologists rarely speculated on evolutionary development of anatomy beyond the musculoskeletal system and brain size as revealed in fossils. After a brief description of the issues under 26 different headings, he produced a summary critique of these with mainly negative judgments. His main conclusion was that the AAH was unlikely ever to be disproved on the basis of comparative anatomy, and that the one body of data that could potentially disprove it was the fossil record.” ref

“Anthropologist John D. Hawks wrote that it is fair to categorize the AAH as pseudoscience because of the social factors that inform it, particularly the personality-led nature of the hypothesis and the unscientific approach of its adherents. Physical anthropologist Eugenie Scott has described the aquatic ape hypothesis as an instance of “crank anthropology” akin to other pseudoscientific ideas in anthropology such as alien-human interbreeding and Bigfoot.” ref

In The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution (2013), Henry Gee remarked on how a seafood diet can aid in the development of the human brain. He nevertheless criticized the AAH because “it’s always a problem identifying features [such as body fat and hairlessness] that humans have now and inferring that they must have had some adaptive value in the past.” Also “it’s notoriously hard to infer habits [such as swimming] from anatomical structures”.

“Popular support for the AAH has become an embarrassment to some anthropologists, who want to explore the effects of water on human evolution without engaging with the AAH, which they consider “emphasizes adaptations to deep water (or at least underwater) conditions”. Foley and Lahr suggest that “to flirt with anything watery in paleoanthropology can be misinterpreted”, but argue “there is little doubt that throughout our evolution we have made extensive use of terrestrial habitats adjacent to fresh water, since we are, like many other terrestrial mammals, a heavily water-dependent species.” But they allege that “under pressure from the mainstream, AAH supporters tended to flee from the core arguments of Hardy and Morgan towards a more generalized emphasis on fishy things.” ref

“In “The Waterside Ape”, a pair of 2016 BBC Radio documentaries, David Attenborough discussed what he thought was a “move towards mainstream acceptance” for the AAH in the light of new research findings. He interviewed scientists supportive of the idea, including Kathlyn Stewart and Michael Crawford who had published papers in a special issue of the Journal of Human Evolution on “The Role of Freshwater and Marine Resources in the Evolution of the Human Diet, Brain and Behavior”. Responding to the documentaries in a newspaper article, paleoanthropologist Alice Roberts criticized Attenborough’s promotion of AAH and dismissed the idea as a distraction “from the emerging story of human evolution that is more interesting and complex”. She argued that AAH had become “a theory of everything” that is simultaneously “too extravagant and too simple.” ref

“Philosopher Daniel Dennett, in his discussion of evolutionary philosophy, commented “During the last few years, when I have found myself in the company of distinguished biologists, evolutionary theorists, paleoanthropologists and other experts, I have often asked them to tell me, please, exactly why Elaine Morgan must be wrong about the aquatic theory. I haven’t yet had a reply worth mentioning, aside from those who admit, with a twinkle in their eyes, that they have also wondered the same thing.” He challenged both Elaine Morgan and the scientific establishment in that “Both sides are indulging in adapt[at]ionist Just So stories“. Along the same lines, historian Erika Lorraine Milam noted that independent of Morgan’s work, certain standard explanations of human development in paleoanthropology have been roundly criticized for lacking evidence, while being based on sexist assumptions. Anatomy lecturer Bruce Charlton gave Morgan’s book Scars of Evolution an enthusiastic review in the British Medical Journal in 1991, calling it “exceptionally well written” and “a good piece of science.” ref

“In 1995, paleoanthropologist Phillip Tobias declared that the savannah hypothesis was dead, because the open conditions did not exist when humanity’s precursors stood upright and that therefore the conclusions of the Valkenberg conference were no longer valid. Tobias praised Morgan’s book Scars of Evolution as a “remarkable book”, though he said that he did not agree with all of it. Tobias and his student further criticized the orthodox hypothesis by arguing that the coming out of the forest of man’s precursors had been an unexamined assumption of evolution since the days of Lamarck, and followed by Darwin, Wallace, and Haeckel, well before Raymond Dart used it.” ref

“Alister Hardy was astonished and mortified in 1960 when the national Sunday papers carried banner headlines “Oxford professor says man a sea ape”, causing problems with his Oxford colleagues. As he later said to his ex-pupil Desmond Morris, “Of course I then had to write an article to refute this saying no this is just a guess, a rough hypothesis, this isn’t a proven fact. And of course, we’re not related to dolphins.” Elaine Morgan’s 1972 book Descent of Woman became an international best-seller, a Book of the Month selection in the United States, and was translated into ten languages. The book was praised for its feminism but paleoanthropologists were disappointed with its promotions of the AAH. Morgan removed the feminist critique and left her AAH ideas intact, publishing the book as The Aquatic Ape 10 years later, but it did not garner any more positive reaction from scientists.” ref

“Although the general reaction to Hardy and Morgan’s proposals was silence by the relevant academic community, there have been over the last decades some academics who were inspired by AAH proposals, even to the point of pursuing particular lines of research on its basis. Some of the academics and professional scientists who have supported the AAH include Michael Crawford, Professor and Director of the Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition at Imperial College London, his former postdoctoral researcher, Stephen Cunnane, now professor of medicine at Université de Sherbrooke, Erika Schagatay, professor of Environmental Physiology at Mid Sweden University, Kathlyn M. Stewart, Section Head of Palaeobiology at the Canadian Museum of Nature, and Tom Brenna, Professor of Paediatrics and Chemistry at University of Texas.” ref

“AAH proponent Algis Kuliukas, performed experiments to measure the comparative energy used when lacking orthograde posture with using fully upright posture. Although it is harder to walk upright with bent knees on land, this difference gradually diminishes as the depth of water increases and is still practical in thigh-high water. In a critique of the AAH, Henry Gee questioned any link between bipedalism and diet. Gee writes that early humans have been bipedal for 5 million years, but our ancestors’ “fondness for seafood” emerged a mere 200,000 years ago.” ref

“Evidence supports aquatic food consumption in Homo as early as the Pliocene, but its linkage to brain evolution remains controversial. Further, there is no evidence that humans ate fish in significant amounts earlier than tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago. Supporters argue that the avoidance of taphonomic bias is the problem, as most hominin fossils occur in lake-side environments, and the presence of fish remains is therefore not proof of fish consumption. They also claim that the archaeological record of human fishing and coastal settlement is fundamentally deficient due to postglacial sea level rise.” ref

“In their 1989 book The Driving Force: Food, Evolution and The Future, Michael Crawford and David Marsh claimed that omega-3 fatty acids were vital for the development of the brain: “A branch of the line of primitive ancestral apes was forced by competition to leave the trees and feed on the seashore. Searching for oysters, mussels, crabs, crayfish and so on they would have spent much of their time in the water and an upright position would have come naturally.” ref

“Crawford and Marsh opined that the brain size in aquatic mammals is similar to humans, and that other primates and carnivores lost relative brain capacity. Cunnane, Stewart, Crawford, and colleagues published works arguing a correlation between aquatic diet and human brain evolution in their “shore-based diet scenario”, acknowledging the Hardy/Morgan’s thesis as a foundation work of their model. As evidence, they describe health problems in landlocked communities, such as cretinism in the Alps and goitre in parts of Africa due to salt-derived iodine deficiency, and state that inland habitats cannot naturally meet human iodide requirements.” ref

“Biologists Caroline Pond and Dick Colby were highly critical, saying that the work provided “no significant new information that would be of interest to biologists” and that its style was “speculative, theoretical and in many places so imprecise as to be misleading.” British palaeontologist Henry Gee, who remarked on how a seafood diet can aid in the development of the human brain, nevertheless criticized AAH because inferring aquatic behavior from body fat and hairlessness patterns is an unjustifiable leap.” ref

“Aside from working as a professor, Erika Schagatay is also an experienced scuba and freediver whose research centers around human diving abilities. She suggests that such abilities are consistent with selective pressure for underwater foraging during human evolution, and discussed other anatomical traits speculated as diving adaptations by Hardy/Morgan. John Langdon suggested that such traits could be enabled by a human developmental plasticity.” ref

“Tom Brenna, professor of pediatrics whose primary research focuses on fats, oils, and fatty acids, listened to the 2005 radio documentary Scars of Evolution where David Attenborough reported an observation that harbor seals were born with something that resembled human vernix caseosa. Intrigued, Brenna led a team that collaborated with Judy St Leger at San Diego Seaworld to compare the chemistry of human vernix and samples from California sea lion pups. They established that the molecular composition of both is similar, being rich in branched chain fatty acids and squalene.” ref

Actual Human Evolution

“Human evolution is the evolutionary process within the history of primates that led to the emergence of Homo sapiens as a distinct species of the hominid family, which includes the great apes. This process involved the gradual development of traits such as human bipedalism and language, as well as interbreeding with other hominins, which indicate that human evolution was not linear but a web.” ref

“The study of human evolution involves several scientific disciplines, including physical anthropology, primatology, archaeology, paleontology, neurobiology, ethology, linguistics, evolutionary psychology, embryology, and genetics. Genetic studies show that primates diverged from other mammals about 85 million years ago, in the Late Cretaceous period, and the earliest fossils appear in the Paleocene, around 55 million years ago.” ref

“Within the superfamily Hominoidea, the family Hominidae diverged from the family Hylobatidae some 15–20 million years ago; subfamily Homininae (African apes) diverged from Ponginae (orangutans^[a]) about 14 million years ago; the tribe Hominini (including humans, Australopithecus, and chimpanzees) parted from the tribe Gorillini (gorillas) between 8–9 million years ago; and, in turn, the subtribes Hominina (humans and extinct biped ancestors) and Panina (chimpanzees) separated 4–7 million years ago.” ref

“Human evolution from its first separation from the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees is characterized by a number of morphological, developmental, physiological, and behavioral changes. The most significant of these adaptations are bipedalism, increased brain size, lengthened ontogeny (gestation and infancy), and decreased sexual dimorphism. The relationship between these changes is the subject of ongoing debate. Other significant morphological changes included the evolution of a power and precision grip, a change first occurring in H. erectus.” ref

“Bipedalism is the basic adaptation of the hominid and is considered the main cause behind a suite of skeletal changes shared by all bipedal hominids. The earliest hominin, of presumably primitive bipedalism, is considered to be either Sahelanthropus^[11] or Orrorin, both of which arose some 6 to 7 million years ago. The non-bipedal knuckle-walkers, the gorillas and chimpanzees, diverged from the hominin line over a period covering the same time, so either Sahelanthropus or Orrorin may be our last shared ancestor. Ardipithecus, a full biped, arose approximately 5.6 million years ago.” ref

“The early bipeds eventually evolved into the australopithecines and still later into the genus Homo. There are several theories of the adaptation value of bipedalism. It is possible that bipedalism was favored because it freed the hands for reaching and carrying food, saved energy during locomotion, enabled long-distance running and hunting, provided an enhanced field of vision, and helped avoid hyperthermia by reducing the surface area exposed to direct sun; features all advantageous for thriving in the new savanna and woodland environment created as a result of the East African Rift Valley uplift versus the previous closed forest habitat.” ref

“A 2007 study provides support for the hypothesis that walking on two legs, or bipedalism, evolved because it used less energy than quadrupedal knuckle-walking. However, recent studies suggest that bipedality without the ability to use fire would not have allowed global dispersal. This change in gait saw a lengthening of the legs proportionately when compared to the length of the arms, which were shortened through the removal of the need for brachiation. Another change is the shape of the big toe. Recent studies suggest that australopithecines still lived part of the time in trees as a result of maintaining a grasping big toe. This was progressively lost in habilines.” ref

“Anatomically, the evolution of bipedalism has been accompanied by a large number of skeletal changes, not just to the legs and pelvis, but also to the vertebral column, feet and ankles, and skull. The femur evolved into a slightly more angular position to move the center of gravity toward the geometric center of the body. The knee and ankle joints became increasingly robust to better support increased weight. To support the increased weight on each vertebra in the upright position, the human vertebral column became S-shaped and the lumbar vertebrae became shorter and wider. In the feet the big toe moved into alignment with the other toes to help in forward locomotion. The arms and forearms shortened relative to the legs making it easier to run. The foramen magnum migrated under the skull and more anterior.” ref

“The most significant changes occurred in the pelvic region, where the long downward facing iliac blade was shortened and widened as a requirement for keeping the center of gravity stable while walking; bipedal hominids have a shorter but broader, bowl-like pelvis due to this. A drawback is that the birth canal of bipedal apes is smaller than in knuckle-walking apes, though there has been a widening of it in comparison to that of australopithecine and modern humans, permitting the passage of newborns due to the increase in cranial size but this is limited to the upper portion, since further increase can hinder normal bipedal movement.” ref

“The shortening of the pelvis and smaller birth canal evolved as a requirement for bipedalism and had significant effects on the process of human birth which is much more difficult in modern humans than in other primates. During human birth, because of the variation in size of the pelvic region, the fetal head must be in a transverse position (compared to the mother) during entry into the birth canal and rotate about 90 degrees upon exit. The smaller birth canal became a limiting factor to brain size increases in early humans and prompted a shorter gestation period leading to the relative immaturity of human offspring, who are unable to walk much before 12 months and have greater neoteny, compared to other primates, who are mobile at a much earlier age. The increased brain growth after birth and the increased dependency of children on mothers had a major effect upon the female reproductive cycle, and the more frequent appearance of alloparenting in humans when compared with other hominids. Delayed human sexual maturity also led to the evolution of menopause with one explanation providing that elderly women could better pass on their genes by taking care of their daughter’s offspring, as compared to having more children of their own.” ref

“The human species eventually developed a much larger brain than that of other primates—typically 1,330 cm³ (81 cu in) in modern humans, nearly three times the size of a chimpanzee or gorilla brain. After a period of stasis with Australopithecus anamensis and Ardipithecus, species which had smaller brains as a result of their bipedal locomotion, the pattern of encephalization started with Homo habilis, whose 600 cm³ (37 cu in) brain was slightly larger than that of chimpanzees. This evolution continued in Homo erectus with 800–1,100 cm³ (49–67 cu in), and reached a maximum in Neanderthals with 1,200–1,900 cm³ (73–116 cu in), larger even than modern Homo sapiens. This brain increase manifested during postnatal brain growth, far exceeding that of other apes (heterochrony). It also allowed for extended periods of social learning and language acquisition in juvenile humans, beginning as much as 2 million years ago.” ref

“Furthermore, the changes in the structure of human brains may be even more significant than the increase in size. The temporal lobes, which contain centers for language processing, have increased disproportionately, as has the prefrontal cortex, which has been related to complex decision-making and moderating social behavior. Encephalization has been tied to increased meat and starches in the diet, and the development of cooking, and it has been proposed that intelligence increased as a response to an increased necessity for solving social problems as human society became more complex. Changes in skull morphology, such as smaller mandibles and mandible muscle attachments, allowed more room for the brain to grow.” ref

“The increase in volume of the neocortex also included a rapid increase in size of the cerebellum. Its function has traditionally been associated with balance and fine motor control, but more recently with speech and cognition. The great apes, including hominids, had a more pronounced cerebellum relative to the neocortex than other primates. It has been suggested that because of its function of sensory-motor control and learning complex muscular actions, the cerebellum may have underpinned human technological adaptations, including the preconditions of speech.” ref

“The immediate survival advantage of encephalization is difficult to discern, as the major brain changes from Homo erectus to Homo heidelbergensis were not accompanied by major changes in technology. It has been suggested that the changes were mainly social and behavioral, including increased empathic abilities, increases in size of social groups, and increased behavioral plasticity. Encephalization may be due to a dependency on calorie-dense, difficult-to-acquire food.” ref

Aquatic Ape Theory/Hypothesis? As Always, Just Pseudoscience.

Aquatic ape Hypothesis

Actual Human Evolution

Herpes Infected Humans Before They Were Human

The Atheist-Humanist-Leftist Revolutionaries Shows in the prehistory series:

Damien Marie AtHope (Said as “At” “Hope”)/(Autodidact Polymath but not good at math):

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