Before I get into it, just know the pictures just serve as visual representations, not actual pictures
Okay so anyway, evidence for this theory is the following:
THE FACT THAT HUMANS ARE SO HAIRLESS:
Only two kind of habitats give rise to hairless animals, an aquatic one and a one below the ground (a naked mole rat for example)
.The suggestion that humans have become hairless to prevent overheating has been rendered false because hair can act like a defense against the sun.
This is why camels retain their fur even in the hot dessert environment.
OUR FAT CELLS
We have ten times the number of fat cells as expected in an animal our size. Only two types of animals have large fat cells: hibernating and aquatic ones.
In hibernating it’s seasonal fat, but in aquatic it’s all year round. It’s unreasonable to think that we evolved this feature in land because large fat pockets would have just slowed us down.
Primate babies are always born slender, but human babies start to develop fat even before birth.
WALKING ON TWO LEGS
So we’re the only mammals that have developed bipedalism. This is a surprise, because walking on 2 legs vs. walking on 4 legs is very disadvantageous. It’s slower, unstable, our organs are vulnerable to damage.
One theory is that if our habitat was flooded, we’d have to walk on two legs to keep our heads above the water.
The only animal who has ever evolved a pelvis like ours, the swamp ape, used this method.
We have conscious control over our breathing. Ever other land animal doesn’t. Mammals like dolphins and seals also conscious control because it tells them how deep they are going to dive and they can estimate how much air they need to inhale.
Our body is so wasteful of salt and water. Think of tears and our way of sweating. Other land mammals don’t have this. Water mammals do however.
Okay anyway I hope you learned something.
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Okay, this is interesting- but no.
Second of all, there’s no where near enough factual support to call this a theory. Hypothesis? Sure. But it’s not well supported enough to be a theory yet, and here’s why:
Anthropologists have tried to explain a multitude of unique features of modern humans as the result of a single adaptive breakthrough- these kinds of hypotheses are called “umbrella hypotheses” and are appealing for their intuitive simplicity but are often internal inconsistent and not backed up by the fossil record or molecular research into genetics.
The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis isn’t parsimonious in the least- and that kinda an important thing for evolutionary hypotheses that rely almost entirely on the fossil record for their back-up. (Note: in this context, parsimony refers to the adoption of the simplest assumption in the formulation of a theory or in the interpretation of data).
A lot of the evidence given above isn’t really evidence at all. It’s based on the assumption that aquatic and amphibious life back in the age when we would have supposedly been partially aquatic was the same as it is in the modern era. It’s based on the idea that we would gained all those adaptions in an evolutionary short period of time, and would have retained them when they became not only unnecessary but also potentially harmful. If we try to say bipedalism was just an adaption to aquatic life, and that our evidence for this is that bipedalism is actually an impediment on land, how do we explain the fact that bipedalism wasn’t selected against once humans returned to terrestrial life?
And how do you back up this supposed “theory” when there’s little to no evidence of it in the fossil record, and no current evidence of it in molecular DNA research? Where. Is. Your. Evidence.
You can’t just draw a bunch of likely seeming inferences off of current life to form theories about how things went millions of years ago. So much random bullshit has been proven to have happened in the course of natural history that it’s kinda dumb to just think that because one explanation makes some intuitive sense that it’s actually what happened.
And the simple fact is that aquatic theory isn’t as parsimonious as terrestrial theory. The numerous “explanations” for individual anatomical traits that it proposes constitute premises that are not better founded than competing terrestrial “explanations”. The unifying theme of aquatic adaptation is considerably less parsimonious than the assumption that the human lineage has always been terrestrial.
Look, I’m not just ripping on aquatic theory here. Any single-cause theory that tries to explain as many of our adaptions at it does is liable to be wrong. The mosaic pattern of hominid evolution demonstrated by the fossil record just doesn’t support those kind of theories, and so far DNA and other kinds of molecular research doesn’t either.
Umbrella hypotheses like this one are popular because they seem like simple answers; Simple answers, however wrong, are easier to communicate and more readily accepted than more sound but more complex solutions. Evolutionary science, and science in general, has to deal with this kind of problem all the time.
Try to remember that something science-y that sounds cool and seems to make some initial sense is actually more likely to be wrong than right. There is a reason it takes so much time and effort from so many generations of people to get breakthroughs. Science is complicated shit.
(Major Info sources: Wikipedia, this article from a 1997 journal on human evolution)