The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis

Cats and kittens, I'm about to blow your minds.

Today I learnt that there is a subset of academia who believe that the distinctiveness of Homo sapiens, compared to other apes, is due to us having evolved from aquatic apes. That is to say (in layman's terms), there are people who believe that we are, all of us, sea monkeys.

Keep in mind that this is just a theory, of course, not absolute solid fact. There is some pretty interesting evidence to support it, too. Activate: dot point mode!

• Bipedalism is a nonsense way of going about being terrestrial! It is stupid for your back, knees and organs. In the water, however, your torso and joints are supported and you can breathe more easily.
• We are pretty hairless! You know what other mammals are pretty hairless? Rhinoceroses and elephants, and we already know that they have aquatic ancestors. Also dolphins and whales! Need I say more?
• Our babies are fat. Apparently the specific type of fat (i.e. subcutaneous) is good for insulation and streamlining in the water.
• We have descended larynxes. Only (other?) aquatic mammals and large deer have this trait.

• A bunch of stuff in our nose to stop water from getting in there.
• Glands (sebaceous glands) all over our skin to produce a magical kind of lubricant.
• Our brains require iodine (and a few other things also), which is (are) most easily obtained from seafood.
• Voluntary breath control, which allows us to hold our breath under water, and also pronounce vowels! That is why lesser apes cannot speak our holy tongue. They can't breathe properly, because evolution did them wrong.
• Vestigial webbing between our fingers. I think most of us commented on how our hands looked like duck's feet when we were kids. Or maybe I just had a bizarre childhood.

• Our spawn have waxy coatings over them. Oh those crazy spawn of ours!
• Our kidneys. Apparently they are aquakidneys.

And, last but not least:

• The mammalian diving reflex!

Dot point mode, deactivate! DYOO dyoo dyooooo...

The mammalian diving reflex lets us stay underwater for a longer amount of time by optimising our breathing systems. It's like a Game Booster for our respiration system. Seals, otters and dolphins all have pretty strong MDFs, and we also have a cheap pirated version of it! Hooray for pirate diving reflexes!

The reflex itself works by slowing our heart rate down 10-25% as soon as our face comes in to contact with water below 21 C. That's pretty impressive, body! Unfortunately, seals do it better, dropping from 125bpm to 10bpm. So. Thanks for showing us up there, seals. After that, the blood in our hands and feet stops circulating, because hey, we don't need those! If we go deep enough, eventually everything except our brain and heart is cut off. Which is kind of creepy, in my opinion, but no one cares what a crazy man on the internet has to say about these sort of things.

Obviously, this all sounds pretty good for a case for the aquatic ape hypothesis. Unfortunately, most of the evidence can be explained more easily with a less radical account of human evolution. It isn't disproven or anything, I'm just sayin' so you don't all run around declaring us all to be merman.

I find the aquatic ape hypothesis interesting from a cultural perspective too, though. What if Atlantis isn't so far from the truth after all? And mankind has had a strong affinity with sailing and everything. Even the native Hawaiians canoed to New Zealand. I also read somewhere that water was "Jesus' element", since he walked on it and turned it to wine and was himself "the fisher of men" and all that. But water is also vital to our very lives, so I guess it's not that surprising that we should find a few cultural allusions to it.

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• Police sniffer dogs are trained using some chemical that isn't illegal. Which isn't surprising. I wish I could remember what it was.
• People get sleepy in the early afternoon, after lunch, because it's twelve hours after our sleepiest part of sleep and our biological clocks are whacky
• 'n', apparently. I have written 'n' on my hand to remind me of something else that was fascinating that I learnt today. I have no idea what it was, though.