One of the things I thought was the most interesting while watching the Olympics was seeing how different types of activities create different effects on the human body. Compare the average body types of, say, a weight-lifter, to a sprinter, to a swimmer. Each of these focuses on different groups of muscles being used in different ways, resulting in radically different physical shapes. In conjunction with that, I think it’s important to consider the notion that people are most often drawn to activities which suit their body-type or shape. Kind of a generalization, but it serves its purpose for now.

Of all the different groups of athletes, I found myself most grossed-out by swimmers. Not because they’re like bad people or anything, but because of this sort of weird rubbery way they move around. It’s most noticable when they are warming up, just before starting a race. Their bodies wriggle around in a really disconcerting way, I think. But whatever it is really helps them get around in the water. The whole thing made me think, whenever I saw it, about the hypothesis that cetaceans (whales & dolphins) evolved from earlier land-dwelling mammals.

Then today, I happened across another interesting (though scientifically more-questionable) theory, which states that human evolution stems from an acquatic ape. It seems the theory is held with some derision by mainstream science, but overall, it’s pretty interesting.

The prevailing hypothesis is that humans evolved from apes who left the forest to live on the savannah. The acquatic ape theory (AAT) conjectures that there was a period in between forest and savannah living, which possibly consisted of immense flooding of habitats, and groups of apes taking to the water to survive it. The original proponent of this idea was Alister Hardy, but was popularized by Elaine Morgan, in a book called the Acquatic Ape Hypothesis. The hypothesis talks about various aspects of human biology which are not shared by other apes, but which are shared by various water-dwelling creatures. I won’t go into all of them, but they are worth looking into, if you’re interested in this sort of thing. They include things like relative hairlessness, subcutaneous fat, bipedal locomotion and a bunch more. The idea is that we were in or around water long enough to effect significant changes in our physiology, but not long enough for us to adapt completely to water, in the way that whales and dolphins did.

To me, it’s not terribly important whether or not the theory holds up to scientific scrutiny. It’s more interesting to have it as a fantasy, and to let it swim around inside the ocean of your thoughts.

Additional links:

1. The Aquatic Ape Theory
2. More on the aquatic ape theory
3. Did humans descend from “aquatic apes”?
4. Aquatic Ape Hypothesis (Amazon)
5. Strange Creations: Aberrant Ideas of Human Origins from Ancient Astronauts to Aquatic Apes (Amazon)
6. The Scars of Evolution: What Our Bodies Tell Us About Human Origins (Amazon)
7. Whale evolution
8. An introduction to the aquatic ape theory
9. Dolphins on Wikipedia
10. Evolution of cetaceans on Wikipedia
11. Aquatic Ape Theory: Sink or Swim?
12. Georgia’s Swamp Ape: Fact or Fiction?
13. NBC Olympics - Swimming
14. Technological advances to enhance swimmer performance
15. Nike permanently affixes goggles to Olympic swimmers’ eyes