As I mentioned in the introduction to “Suicidal Tendencies,” I approached my “nanotech” stories as self-contained glimpses at a milieu similar to the one I was developing for my subsequently-abandoned novel Light Years Apart. However, it’s safe to say that “Reef Apes” did double duty. I was scratching an itch to explore a hypothesis I find fascinating. It is the idea that the reason humans evolved so differently from other apes is because our ancestors were on their way toward becoming an aquatic species.
If you think we’d make poor whales, you might be right. Think semi-aquatic, like otters or polar bears.
The theory was first popularized in The Descent of Woman, a wry, irreverent layperson’s examination of human-evolution theory written by a British housewife named Elaine Morgan, published in 1973. She in turn took her inspiration from a nearly forgotten 1960 paper by renowned biologist Alister Hardy published in The New Scientist in 1960. Hardy and Morgan pointed out that humans possess anatomical features entirely consistent with aquatic mammals — a layer of subcutaneous fat, larger size than our forebears, a streamlined longitudinal body shape (well suited to both swimming and bipedalism), hairlessness, nostrils tucked on the undersides of our noses, and on and on. These traits are not found among chimpanzees or gorillas. Perhaps our ancestors did spend a lot of time in the water. Perhaps the first tools were used to bash open clams, not poke hyenas. It’s an idea that reviewer Mark Kelly of Locus, when reviewing “Reef Apes,” pointed out either must be true, or is too silly to be true.
Alas, Elaine Morgan couched her ideas in the context of a feminist manifesto, going so far afield as to suggest that the tendency of human females to have difficulty achieving sexual climax is because our species is stuck halfway between terrestrial and aquatic forms. She omitted this and other off-the-deep-end speculation in her 1982 follow-up, The Aquatic Ape, but the damage was done. The fundamental premise, worthy as it may be, was ignored in spite of Descent’s healthy sales numbers. Only lately have reputable scientists been speaking up and pointing out that, by gosh, Lucy and other early hominid fossils do have an astonishing propensity to have been originally laid down in the mud of lakes. Perhaps they will find confirmation of the hypothesis. Perhaps they won’t. I’m glad to know they’re making the attempt to know one way or the other.