aquatic ape theory suggests that many features that distinguish humans from their nearest evolutionary relatives emerged because the ancestors of humans underwent a period when they were adapting to an aquatic or semiaquatic way of life, but returned to terrestrial life before having become fully adapted to the aquatic environment. Is there any new evidence of this?
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The Aquatic Ape theory has never gained wide acceptance. This is because it has never had strong evidential support. The features supposedly supporting the hypothesis only do so under an extremely superficial analysis (e.g. the argument for bipedalism), frequently actually occur in other non-aquatic mammals (e.g. hairlessness in naked mole rats and rhinos, a descended larynx in red deer), show no sign of having arisen at similar times in the human evolutionary record (e.g. encephalisation evolved far later than bipedalism and bipedalism vastly predates hairlessness) and lack fossil evidence of having evolved near aquatic environments. |
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