Thursday 14 February 2013

Is there any recent evidence for the aquatic ape theory of human evolution?

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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