Hello, anybody home?

I just ran across this from April 16, 2012, smithsonianmag.com

“A New Aquatic Ape Theory.” It’s the frustration of being the tree falling in the forest, that no one is hearing. The gist of the article is covering a paper published in 2009 by Richard Wrangham of Harvard where, it appears, he proposed that “shallow aquatic habitats allowed hominids to thrive in savannas, enabling our ancestors to move from tropical forests to open grasslands.

“About 2.5 million to 1.4 million years ago, when the genus Homo emerged, Africa became drier. During certain seasons, already dry savannas became even more arid, making it difficult for hominids to find adequate food. But Wrangham’s team argues that even in this inhospitable environment there were oases: wetlands and lake shores. In these aquatic habitats, water lilies, cattails, herbs and other plants would have had edible, nutritious underground parts—roots and tubers—that would have been available year-round. These ‘fallback’ foods would have gotten hominids through the lean times.”

Readers of this blog and AAT chat sites from long before that know that I proposed this theory perhaps twenty-five years ago or better. You just have to go back to early posts on this blog to see those very arguments. In fact, I’d fairly recently written an update that I wasn't going to post to the blog because I’d already said it; but because parts of it are rather fun reading, anyway, I thought that posting in light of Wrangham’s report might be worthwhile.

Wrangham, if you’re not familiar with him (I’m not), achieved notoriety recently for theories propounded in a book Catching Fire (which I have not read) that suggest that cooking was an early advancer of our physical development. It hadn’t occurred to me that there would have been any question about that, but, apparently, there was. In any event, Wrangham cemented it in people’s minds that barbecue changed our entire being, not just what we had on Saturday night. Richard, it appears, isn’t afraid to advance the obvious as the solution. I’m only hoping he came up with the idea long before 2009. Not the fire bit, the living by water bit; because only a fool—and there a lot of the out there—would deny that we already are a semiaquatic animal. Only a fool.

I never quite finished this, but it's close enough for folk music. I was rushed. Without further ado, the long, boring “Why I’m Not a Savannista Anymore.”


Confessions of a Lay Person

I am confused. I am a lay person and I don’t “do” science. I do have an avocational interest in evolution, human evolution in particular, and I try to make sense of what I glean from the popular media.

Which is okay. This is an exciting time for all science, but human evolutionary science has been thrown for a loop these past years with new discoveries and understandings appearing, like phantoms out of the jungle, at an astounding rate. It’s been fun to watch. From Ardi to the Denisovans, a lot of old paradigms have seriously cracked.

But, I gotta tell you, there are some things which don’t add up. Can I borrow your time in the hopes that someone will have an answer for me, be able to tie together these few loose ends? I’m sure that, if I’d paid more attention in Biology 101, I wouldn’t have to ask these questions.

Admittedly, garnering my information from the media warps the knowledge stream considerably, but it is what it is. Maybe it’s all a matter of poor communication.

Might as well begin by pointing out what my problems are, and then we’ll try and figure out how I got here. Let me begin by stating three positions I’ve heard:

—Fish/aquatic life moved from the sea to the land to avoid predators;

—Proto-people descended from the trees and began to walk upright in response to thinning forests;

—And a question posed recently in The New Yorker, is there an evolutionary basis for altruism?

Those are the basics; the details can get a little complex. We have to look at how I perceive what I’ve absorbed from the media.

It’s my understanding that all life on Earth issues from a primitive, self-replicating molecule or string of molecules that had to have come with an equally primitive set of operating instructions including how to find and recognize building (eating) materials and how to reproduce. That’s at the very minimum. Those operating instructions would be the precursors to DNA. How those operating instructions could have grown into long strands of DNA is, as yet, unanswered; or if it has been answered, I haven’t seen it. Once again, the precarious nature of the popular press.

Regardless of how they got there, it’s my understanding that DNA can only change through mutations, which are caused regularly but randomly throughout the chain by exterior forces. That may be a false presumption, but it’s the one I’ve been given. Ask me not about combinatorial DNA.

At that, then, I have a creature who can find food, knows how to reproduce, and whose instructions can only be changed arbitrarily. One would have to presume that any change in instructions would be most likely disastrous, if not neutral, and that ones that were beneficial would be few and far between. On the other hand, those with the beneficial mutation would eventually replace those without. Math alone will do that.

This, of course, is predicated on the assumption that, if nothing else, life wants to live. Wherever that drive comes from, once it’s established, it apparently goes to any lengths to perpetuate itself. That seems to be the basic set of instructions that all life has: go forth and multiply. Nothing more; nothing less. My understanding is that’s it. There are no more instructions; from then on everything is left to chance. And has been since the beginning.

And that’s where the trouble lies. That’s where I lose my way.

Here’s how I see chance. A man goes to the casino. He hits the jackpot; he wins a million dollars. He needed that million dollars; his home was about to be foreclosed and the bank wanted their car back. Did he win the million dollars because he was lucky, or because he needed the money? My understanding is that he was lucky. I mean, the result was great: he got what he needed, the weight was lifted off his back. But did his need for money help him win the jackpot? When you, look at someone who has won the jackpot, do you think, gee, he/she sure must have needed that money?

Let’s go back to that fish wanting to get onshore. If a fish were to move onshore to avoid predators, how would that happen? How many evolutionary steps would it take for a fish to evolve into a land animal? How many mutations? Just to escape that predator? How would moving out of the water a little bit and then a little bit more over hundreds-of-thousands, if not millions of years, ever escape one from a predator? If there weren’t any use in being just a little bit out of the water, how would that trait be passed on? Would it be waiting for a multiplier mutation to allow the fish to pop out of the water even further? But if the popping out were useless at that point, would multipliers keep piling up randomly until one day the fish could walk out of the water and survive the predators? If that were the case, wouldn’t it happen to all aquatic life, predators too? I’m having trouble picturing all this. A waiting for Godot fish, waiting till it can miraculously walk on land and escape the nemesis of the deep. It seems that the odds of that randomly happening would be zilch.

It seems much more likely to me that a shore-dwelling fish might find that the land vegetation growing near the shore provided good food, a vegetarian fish. Let’s say that fish really became dependent on the abundant land vegetation that happened to droop or fall into the stream. Let’s presume that any little mutation that helped that fish acquire more of that plant would be spread throughout the species. Let’s presume that staying out of the water as long as possible meant getting the most food. Let’s presume that any mutation that allowed the fish to stay out of the water longer would be passed on to the entire species. In that way, little by little a fish could find itself out of the water happily munching on ferns or lichens or small English crumpets. Of course, being out of the water would have its side benefits, no more predators; but that would probably be balanced by having to get used to the weather. The tipping point, I think, wouldn’t be safety, it would be food.

Follow me this far? Because the implication is that, if mutations are ruled by chance, then evolution is ruled by chance. If evolution is ruled by chance, then there’s no march, no direction to evolution. It means that evolution is governed by opportunity, not by the result. The fish evolved out of the water because it could find better food, there was an opportunity to evolve in that direction should the chance arise. Even though at first the fish slowly moving out of the water wouldn’t be any safer from any predators, so that wouldn’t have provided any incentive; but the increased food supply would incrementally keep getting better and provide enough value to the species that such traits would be saved. The fish didn’t evolve to live outside the water because it was safer, even though that was the result. After an extinction event we don’t get an explosion of species because there are all those niches needing to be filled (or that it would be a good idea to fill); we get the explosion because all those niches are empty.

It seems to me that’s the same problem with the second position: that people took to the ground because the trees were thinning. Once again, I have trouble seeing how that would work. If the previous paragraph is true and evolution is governed by opportunity, not by the result, then we have to ask what opportunities enticed the forest dwellers onto the land? Not forced them, enticed them?

Moreover, where did they get the time? Remember that at this time, 2 1/2 million years or so ago, our ancestors were little more than chimpanzees; we’d made the split, but we hadn’t progressed very far. We had no “culture” to protect us at that time; we suffered the same natural laws as any other animal. That’s where the time comes in.

Again, I’m no scientist and I don’t know how these things work; I’ve got to trust that I can winnow through what I read and hear. I hear a lot about global warming. I hear a lot about species going extinct. By the thousands. All over the world because their habitats are disappearing. I hear some habitats are merely shifting and that some animals/plants can accommodate the move. They arrive earlier in the year or don’t migrate anymore. Mostly, though, I hear the habitats are destroyed or there’s no corridor between remaining remnants. Then I hear that species die. Funny, you’d think I’d hear of species adapting. That’s what we’re to believe proto-people did. If those folks could learn how to walk upright out on the savannah, why can’t the polar bear head into the woods? Why can one species adapt and the others fail? What made us unique?

For every other species, they appear to go extinct rather than adapt because environmental conditions change much more rapidly than evolutionary adaptation. The general rule seems to be that, if a habitat disappears from underneath a species, that species will disappear. If someone could point to a bunch of species contradicting that rule, let me know. Heck, even one would be interesting.

Perhaps people are the one.

Perhaps they’re not.

There are alternative scenarios. People could have been drawn out of the trees. There may have been opportunities presented to them which rewarded standing up on two feet, regardless of what the forest was doing. It’s another case of not looking at the results but, instead, look for the cause, look for the opportunity. The assumption is that people were forced out of the trees (but the chimps weren’t?) and then learned to adapt to their new surroundings by learning to walk upright. One can only surmise that, after the thinning of the forest but before the adaptation of upright walking, when they were still only adapted to climbing trees, they must have been easy pickings. Unless, of course, it didn’t happen that way.

Truthfully, this is where I get stuck. If it didn’t happen that way, how could it have happened? And if it did happen that way, where’s the evidence?

Lacking evidence, I’ve made up my own scenario. I don’t think anyone left the trees because they had to. I think they left the trees because they found more/better food while standing up. Once again, I’m relying on the understanding that any successful mutation has to benefit the entire species, and that it would take innumerable mutations to change from a tree-dwelling to a terrestrial creature, and that each mutation along the way would have to be immediately beneficial else it would disappear or remain neutral. It’s like the fish and the food, each step towards upright walking would have to be beneficial, not just the end result (as if there were an “end result” beyond the current status). Something beneficial is going to have to happen each step of the way towards bipedalism; one can’t keep slowly standing up in hopes there will be a payoff when you get up straight; there has to be benefit in each mutation. And benefit, we remember from the beginning of those self-replicating molecules, can only be in one of two forms: it either helps with food gathering or reproduction; nothing else matters.

I figure it’s not sex. I doubt that people stood up because sex was better that way or that we had more kids that way; on the contrary, it appears that standing up made birth more difficult. There had to have been some powerful incentive to stand up if it made reproduction so difficult. The only other permissible incentive is food. (With the usual caveat that, if you can think of another incentive, give me a shake.) For some reason, standing up allowed us to eat better. Whatever the reason, it pretty much has to be related to our ability to find food. It probably had nothing to do with a thinning forest. Evolution doesn’t go away from anything, it only goes towards something, right? A species can only evolve in the direction chance and opportunity permit.

So, what would entice an ape out of the trees to permanently hang out on the ground? What food would have been available to us as bipeds that wasn’t available to us as knuckle walkers? The chimps and gorillas seem to survive just fine living in both worlds. Why did we give up the trees, they didn’t? We were lucky, eventually our posture allowed us to take over the entire world, but, surely, that’s not why we stood up. We could only have stood up to eat better; taking over the world was pure luck.

How, though, would bipedalism help us eat better?

I’ve heard theories. I’ve heard that, perhaps, standing up offered a smaller target to the sun so we didn’t overheat while out on the savannah hunting. Hmm? I have visions of hunters trekking across the plains, leaning towards the sun so that it only shines on the tops of their heads. As the day stretches on, they become almost parallel to the ground. I don’t think so. Nope.

I’ve heard that, maybe, we stood up to see over the tall grasses either to spot game or predators. Maybe. And at the same time we were willing to give up any ability to run fast or climb out of harm’s way? How did we ever survive? How come no other animal successfully did this? How come every other animal learned to stand up, check out the surroundings, and then get down on all fours and run like hell? How come we were willing to give up our chance to escape just to peak above the grass? How come there’s not a race of bipedal prairie dogs?

I’ve heard that it’s possible we took to standing up to carry food to our families. Again, us and nobody else? Look around you, don’t most of the larger animals carry food to their young? Such as, virtually all of them? Mammals, indeed, have it built in; but even after the young have stopped suckling, the parents generally spend a long time bringing solid food to their offspring. None has seen it advisable to stand up to do so. None. Does that not give you pause to wonder how it could have happened to humans? Did we/do we spend so much time carting food around that it was worthwhile to stand up and do it permanently? Doesn’t seem like it.

Other reasons? Wading around after clams and seaweed? All day? Not likely. We may well have taken to scavenging the shoreline and the swamps, but I doubt we’d have given up the safety of the trees just to do it.

Well, what then?

A change in diet?

A change in diet? How on earth could a change in diet make one want to stand up? There is the fruit-picking theory, that we stood up to gather fruit and nuts. But, really, if you’re going after fruit and nuts, wouldn’t it be better to stay in the trees? How would standing up help one gain access to more/better fruit? You’d give up climbing the trees for standing on the ground and throwing sticks? Really? I don’t think it was fruit and nuts that got us standing up. I don’t.

I think it was meat.

Let’s step back a minute and delve more into popular science: hello NOVA. In the past decades we’ve learned that humans are not the only tool users. Not even the only primate tool users. In fact, all apes are known to use tools of one sort or another. The chimpanzees, we’ve learned, not only go fishing for termites with long twigs, they’re perfectly capable of sharpening a stick with their teeth and going after bush babies, a lesser primate, using the stick as a thrusting spear. That was a shock. Furthermore, they’re not above heaving rocks at an enemy, albeit, underhand.

It could be that chimps acquired this habit after the split with humans, but it’s more likely that the progenitor of both species was already using such tools better than six million years ago. Fast forward to the first known shaped-stone tool use among humans, something like 2 1/2 million years ago. That gives humans 3 1/3 million years to progress from tooth-sharpened sticks and tossed rocks to hand-axes. (If these numbers aren’t exactly to your liking, fill in those of your choice; you have the basic concept.)

Why, you may ask, did this pre-split chimp-human (chuman?) take up sharpening sticks in the first place? You might as well ask, why weren’t they satisfied with termites and bananas? What’s so special about meat? Other than it’s concentrated food. Have you ever noticed how much more time a zebra spends eating than a lion does? I have. Out here on the veldt (not really) I notice the lions spend most of the day lazing around while the zebras are eating every chance they get. Such as when they’re not being chased by lions. It’s the meat. Vegetarians simply have to spend a lot more time crunching away just to get the same food energy that a carnivore does. A lot more.

I’ll tell you what I think happened. I think the split between us and the chimps happened because we really got into meat eating. I think that, before the split, like chimps today, we only used tools occasionally. When we decided to go after bush babies, we would find a stick, sharpen it, and go after them, only to abandon the stick after the hunt. Next hunt, new stick.

But one chimp developed a habit, it sharpened a sick and held on to it. No particular reason, he just liked to sharpen sticks and hold onto them. As a side effect, when a bush baby hole popped into view, he was at the ready; consequently, he ate better than his neighbors. He passed that spear-holding trait onto his kids and his grandkids and they ate and prospered better than any of the others in their tribe. Eventually, everybody was sharpening and hanging onto sticks. Suddenly, the whole tribe was eating better than anyone else in the forest. Eventually, holding a spear at the ready became habitual; those who did it more, prospered more. Slowly, those who were better at handling their spears prospered more than those who were clumsy. Likewise, those who became better at throwing stones were also able to eat better, and, if they had a few stones always at hand, so much the better. The drift towards habitually carrying tools had begun. We were separating from the chimps. That’s how I see it, anyway.

Eventually, of course, successfully carrying tools (i.e. weapons) at all times meant that we inexorably switched from habitual to obligatory bipedalism. There was no way back; we were upright.

Huh? How does that sound? Doesn’t that make more sense than peeping over the grass or carrying rodents back to the kids, not to mention lessening the chance of sunstroke. Could it have taken us 3 1/2 million years to stand up and shape hand tools? Seems fast to me, but could be, we were clever. We do know that something got us to stand up and make hand axes by 2 1/2 million years ago, and we know it had to do with food, and we’re pretty sure it didn’t have to do with pancakes. I’d go with meat and weapons.

If that theory is correct, that habitual tool-carrying led to obligate bipedalism, it throws new light on the ability of our ancestors to expand their hunting range. They might still camp in the forest, but they could now contemplate ranging out after bigger game. Twenty or thirty Australopithecines armed with rocks and spears would be formidable even for a pride of lions. Fifty or sixty together could take over about anything.

That’s it. That how I see we came down out of the trees. Admittedly, it’s a wild guess, but it sounds good, no?

A bonus point is that, if our ancestors still liked to hang around trees even after they learned to walk; it makes it easier to imagine that a branch of that family, us, liked to hang around, not only the woods, but down by the water. We were the guys who learned how to sail and eat seafood. We prospered. We now live all over the world, provided it has potable water and is close to navigable water. Even the farmers and the herders live near water; we’ve never gotten over that.

Now, about that altruism. The New Yorker asks if its an inheritable trait? They meant it in a good way.

A problem I have with altruism being an inheritable trait is that altruism is a value judgement, not a scientific measurement. It’s akin to asking, is being a good farmer an inheritable trait? Is there a genetic basis for good farming?

Intellectually, altruism assumes free will, something for which we don’t have clear evidence. The core definition of “altruism,” if I have it right, is doing good for another at personal cost to oneself. This presumes we’re in  control of our thoughts and actions, another case of something that might or might not be true. It’s not clear that consciousness, no matter how advanced, is anything more than a monitoring and transmission station. It’s very fast and it gives us the illusion we’re doing the thinking for operational purposes, but I’m not sure we know how that’s done. My guess is that thinking is done at the cellular level or below and is primarily a matter of counting switches, yeses and nos. It’s why we can ponder some problems forever without making up our minds or why we can “instinctively” jump in front of a train to save someone. In neither case is our consciousness making the decision, it’s only transmitting data. I think if we had to think about thinking, we’d be frozen in our tracks.

Let’s go back, then, to that pre-cellular creature and its mutations. We’ve already determined two things: one, that mutations can only be adopted if they improve either feeding or reproduction; and two, successful mutations have to benefit the entire species in order to survive. The process, it would appear, means that the operating package that each member of a species gets gives instructions that propel the organism one way or another simply by checking the situation against its given template. If the monitoring station sends the propitious signals, go for it. No thinking necessary, just compare to the template. That system would work all the way up to us. We never really think, we just do what our sub-engine—oh heck, let’s just call it a subconscious—decides.

Hunting For an Answer

While prowling the Net recently I came across the site of a fellow from Eugene, OR who has devoted himself to debunking The Aquatic Ape Theory (AAT). We corresponded a couple times until he quit responding.

Now, it’s curious enough to devote yourself to being against something rather than for something, but why AAT? What did it ever do to him to cause him such determination?

Well, that aside, I wrote him my usual question of “when did humans take to living at the water’s edge”? And cited our inordinate amount of water consumption as an anomaly that needed explaining. As is usual with savannistas, they can’t bring themselves to use the word “demographics.” I try to get them to say it out loud: “dem-oh-graficks.” No luck.

Jim dismissed human water consumption, saying it was the same as other mammals and then cited our industrial, agricultural, and transportation uses for pumping up our apparent consumption. When I cried foul on his arguments, he stopped writing.

I’ve had other savannistas allege human water consumption to be the same as other mammals, which I find exceedingly difficult to understand. Not that statement, I understand what they’re saying; but how could they possibly make such a statement and then expect us to stick around for the rest of the argument? Mammals? Let’s see, we’ve got whales and kangaroo mice and wolves and door mice and howler monkeys and bears and otters and beavers and zebras and elephants and hippos… Whew, can I stop now? They all have the same water requirements? Did anybody look? Did they think about it?

So, either they thought about it or they didn’t. If they didn’t think about it, they should have; and they have no business being in the business if they haven’t thought about it. Or they thought about it and came to a completely erroneous conclusion, only means they shouldn’t be in the business if they can’t think any better than that.

Did I make myself clear?

Likewise, it felt silly pointing out to Jim that I was talking about personal water consumption, not industrial/agricultural uses. Could he have figured that out from context? Well, if you think all mammals drink the same amount of water (per pound of animal, of course), you might have trouble with the rest of it. Jim has a religious focus on debunking AAT that I was unable to shake.

As you know, I’m not an advocate of AAT, but I do advocate that the problems raised by AAT be addressed.

I have come recently to an understanding about my argument with the savannistas. Perhaps part of the problem is semantics, how we’re using language. The savannistas claim that early man, when he descended from the trees, moved onto the savannas. My problem has always been, when did we then move to the waterhole? That’s where my discussions with paleoanthropologists breaks down; they are unable to conceive of humans in demographic terms. They don’t know what it means when I ask that question.

I think part of the problem lies in what we mean when we say “to live.” And perhaps that comes from comparing us with our cousins, the chimps, etc. It’s my understanding that the other great apes do not have regular camps, but move around as a group within their prescribed territory. Resting places may vary from night to night. Babies born are carried along with the tribe.

This, of course, is very different from most predators (all?). Predators have dens, lairs, where their young are born and raised until ready to join the hunt. The same den will be used for years off and on. The den will be as close to the hunting ground as possible yet be out of harm’s way. When I ask, where does that predator live? I’m asking where does it make its home?

What I’ve ignored in my arguments was the difference between nest site and hunting territory. Or at least I haven’t made this distinction clear. I’m full well ready to concede that, once we came down from the trees, we were hunters; that’s why we came down. But once we we down, we were no longer omnivores, we were becoming carnivores. We were adopting the manner of predators: one doesn’t take ones young on the hunt; one brings food back.

My contention is that place to where the food was brought back was by the waterhole. Ergo, we live there today and drink a hell of a lot of water.

In the end, that argument is dismissed but never rebutted. It’s going to be long after my death when someone in the field has a eureka moment and shouts, “I got it; we’ve always lived where we live, ever since we came down from the trees. How simple. Why did no one think of this before?”

Sorry I’m going to miss it.

Never Cry Wolf

What is it with people and drinking? Have you ever given that much thought? One can imagine chimps hunting together, foraging together, eating together, sleeping together, fighting together, being together together, but can you imagine them sitting around drinking cups of adulterated water together? I can’t.

How about going for a swim? Maybe some fishing? Do chimps ever go after frogs? Turtles? Are chimps inclined to float around on a log for a spell? Perhaps tie—dare we say “raft”?—together a few big logs?

Ever read Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf? There’s a scene in there where he’s trying to see if a wolf, who regularly passed close to his tent, would respect his boundary markings; which he figured meant pissing in the corners, so to speak, just like the wolf did. It worked, but he learned something about peeing in the process. He began by brewing up a pot of tea, having a couple cups, and then waiting.

Until he had to go.

Which he did, and then he’d repeat the whole process over again; but, Christ, he was belting down a lot of tea. He got to wondering, “How does that wolf do it, he doesn’t drink a quarter of what I drink?”

For one thing, he—the wolf—only pees a little bit at each marker, Mowat observed. Unlike people, the wolf was able to turn his urination on and off at will, with no ill effects; he did not walk away with his legs crossed. Furthermore, the wolf’s pee was much more concentrated than his pee; a little went a long way. Compared to the wolf, his pee was, well, weak tea. Farley accidentally came to the realization that people guzzle water like nobody else. At least nobody else out living on the savannah, where we were supposed to have come from. Other animals come to the water hole for a drink; we camp there for the whole afternoon. Us and the elephants.

I wrote a note to Elaine Morgan yesterday. Elaine is the chief apologist for the Aquatic Ape Theory (AAT). I Stumbled Upon a 2009 TED presentation by the delightful lady and felt duty-bound to respond. I noted that I wrote her occasionally and was sorry she hadn’t incorporated demographic data into the understanding of AAT. In her video she lamented academe’s reluctance to even consider AAT, and I was reluctant to point out that she treated demographics the same way.

I repeat my note here:

“The failure of AAT to capture its rightful place in human paleontology is due to its insistence on some untenable assumptions, but the unfortunate consequences are worse. I think it's quite true that much of homo sapiens' physiology comes from an association with water, but because AAT focuses on an unlikely interpretation of the evidence, it has turned most of the profession against the demonstrable associations between people and a water-based environment.

“I think you start the argument from the wrong end. The reason there is no fossil evidence for a previous semi-aquatic existence is probably because there was no such stage. On the other hand, there's abundant evidence that our ancestors—at least many of them—lived in close proximity to water. They may have used the savannahs as hunting grounds, but they evidently lived close to the water's edge and in relatively lush environments. For example, it's one thing to live on the savannah; it's another thing to live on the bank of a river that cuts through the savannah.

“All of that, of course, is somewhat speculative; how does one interpret the evidence, and what is ‘all’ the evidence? What's not speculative is modern demographics. Demographically speaking, humans are currently semi-aquatic animals; there is no question about that, it's absolutely and scientifically demonstrable. A) Everyone on the planet lives within close proximity to a source of fresh water; we know that because we know that without that a person will die. There is no exception. Those who live any distance from potable water spend most of their day acquiring that water. In the ‘civilized’ world, most people have running water in their home or an easily accessible common source. No one lives in the desert; everyone lives at the oasis. B) I would wager that 80% of the people on the planet live within four miles of navigable water. That's a guess, but it can't be too far off. Everyone depends on controlling and having access to water. We have been oceanic seafarers for at least 60,000 years; and we surely didn't start out as capable of crossing long distances, such as to Australia. It implies we began crude sailing much, much earlier. Like probably by the time our species evolved 200,000 years ago. And it would be hard to imagine that, if we were sailing by 200,000 years ago, that we wouldn't have been fishing and harvesting clams and turtles, as well. Which it seems we were doing.

“All that means that we, as a species, have most probably been water-side dwellers for at a minimum 200,000 years, but more likely for millions of years. Obviously you and I think the evidence goes back much further than a few hundred thousand, but I think we can safely say it goes back that far. However far it goes back, it evidently goes back far enough to have affected our physiology for, you're perfectly correct, our physiology more or less demands a semi-aquatic environment. But it doesn't require more of an aquatic environment than we currently enjoy. I repeat: we currently are a semi-aquatic animal. The only real question is, when did we become this way? If you put the question this way, then it becomes incumbent on the paleoanthropologists to find a date when that cross-over occurred. I don't think the demographics are assailable.

“The other part of your argument that, I believe, has to be abandoned is the theory that bipedalism is necessarily connected to our semi-aquatic existence. It's the weakest part of the argument with the least fossil support and logically isn't compelling. It's obviously advantageous to be bipedal if one wants to go wading, but it's doubtful than our ancestors ever got so into wading that the best waders supplanted the non-waders. I don't see that we were ever that dependent on or spent that much time in the water. Whatever water we started out next to, it apparently was fresh. I can't see that we were ever about ready to go swimming with the crocodiles. I can, though, see us, as the smartest ape, moving our abode to where the food was most abundant: the water's edge. We didn't have to hang out with the crocs to benefit from the lush water-side. Furthermore, a water-side existence would have aided our survival in times of shrinking habitat. It's easier to defend ones own turf than to dislodge someone from theirs. We could have spent millions of years living alongside and using water resources just as we do today: food, transportation, safety. If that's true, we would have turned out, well, just the way we turned out.

“My guess about bipedalism—though I have nothing like a demographic argument to buttress it—is that it's a result of habitual tool carrying. I suspect that, as meat eating increased in our diet, those apes who were more able to quickly take advantage of hunting opportunities—i.e. those who were always armed with a pointed stick or a rock—ate and reproduced better than their less prepared brethren; and slowly, habitually bipedal apes took over the species. Once everyone carried weapons all the time (and other things, as well, by the time carrying was habitual), those who were physically better suited to upright posture slowly increased their percentage of the species until we were obligate bipedal. Of course, there's nothing to say that those apes living down by the water, who were already the smart apes, wouldn't have figured out the carrying weapons trick first, as well. It does, though, suggest that bipedalism could have arisen more than once and under more than one condition. In any event, if you abandon connecting bipedalism with a semi-aquatic environment, I think you'll have a greater chance of success.”

•

What surprises me is that I don’t see the “demographic conundrum” being addressed anywhere. Granted, I’m a dilettante, but I don’t recall anyone other than myself ever asking the question of when did we move to the shore where we currently live? Likewise granted, they keep pushing back the age of aquatic resource utilization—only recently reporting 42,000 year old fish hooks—but they appear to think of aquatic resource utilization as an adjunct to a life that was predominantly lived elsewhere. Like on the savannahs. Not as a way of life unto itself.

I’m not here—in the words of Obama, let me be perfectly clear—to argue for any theory about our past behavior (although I have plenty of those, too) but rather to ask, when did our current demographic preference for the water-line take place? Everybody is trying to figure out when we climbed down from the trees, but nobody seems to be trying to figure out when we moved to the lake, river, swamp, ocean, mud puddle, oasis? I guess that’s what bothers me about so much of paleontology, it’s not that their data are wrong, but that they’re asking the wrong questions. Or more aptly put: not asking the right ones. We don’t live on the savannah. Proportionally, the percentage of the population that lives on a savannah anywhere approaches zilch. Even those who look like they live on the savannah, if you look closely, you’ll find they live in a town by the river or they built their house down by the creek. The rest of them? Why, they drive pipes deep into the ground and make artificial springs right where they live. How many of them live out on the savannah—forget about the prairie or the desert? Not a whole lot.

So, I’m not saying here that we didn’t, God only knows, live on the savannah at some distant point in our past; I’m only saying that we don’t live there now. Almost none of us. Every single one of us has moved as close as possible to the water hole, if not a navigable body. When did that happen? If you read current theory, it appears that most professionals think the move to the water’s edge happened after the rise of home sapiens some 200,000 years ago. All I’m looking for is the evidence that makes them think this transfer of habitat took place and when it occurred.

It appears to me that the modern scientific community credits the human species with an incredible plasticity and ability to change its environmental habitat at will. The usual reason given is “culture,” as if culture could change ones resistance to cold or need for water. The current scenario has the early hominin first coming down from the trees, leaning to walk upright, and inhabit the savannahs. That’s the first major habitat change. We know from demographics that said hominins now live next to water courses; which, if the savannah theory is correct, requires a new shift of habitat. That’s two big shifts to get us out of the trees and to the shore where we now live. The simpler scenario, that we came down out of the trees to inhabit the shore line, doesn’t appear to be seriously considered. I would just like the profession—me being a simple layperson—to explain the evidence for those shifts. I simply don’t understand it and would like some help.

For example, I don’t understand what sort of culture an Australopithecine would have had that would have insulated them from climate change; weren’t they some of the people to have first come down from the trees? And doesn’t the theory say that they came down because the forest was disappearing underneath them? That they had to adapt or die? I get to wondering about their cousins, the chimps, wasn’t the forest disappearing under them, too? How did they adapt or how come they didn’t die? Or did their territory and population simply shrink?

Then I get to thinking about the polar bears? I couldn’t begin to count the references I’ve seen to the story that polar bears are in danger of going extinct because their habit is disappearing underneath them. Really? What’s the matter with the polar bears; how come they don’t simply adapt like we did? We had culture? That’s why I wonder what kind of culture the Australopithecines had? Did they really have enough culture to protect them from habitat change? Could someone explain that to me? Being a naive nebbish, I would have thought the Australopithecines obeyed the same natural laws the polar bears do: in the face of habitat extinction, you die. Where did I go wrong?

Why couldn’t it be that we came down from the tree to right where we are now, at the shore line? (Not in the water, silly, kingfishers don’t live in the water; they go in it, but they don’t live in it.) I get it that the profession says we didn’t, but I don’t follow the evidentiary logic. My apologies for being so slow, but I’ve yet to see the fossils that said, “These people definitely didn’t live in the river cut-bank or down by the lake.” Perhaps I missed something; could someone point me in the right direction?

Nonetheless, I think Elaine would have a much better argument if, instead of trying to defend an improbable past, she began chipping away at the props of the current academic position. What savannah? Show me the savannah. I think the savannah is a chimera. Ask them to prove it. And ask when we left it?

Later we can talk about the notion that people stood up to see over tall grass? Oh, come on!

Follow the Bottle Gourd

The Web is aptly named; the strands are infinite and one can get lost in there. Things appear and disappear; move or are gone forever. I recently ran across a Dec. 14, 2005 article from Science Daily, “Ancient Humans Brought Bottle Gourds To The Americas From Asia.” Thank God, because it’s the only work I’ve seen on the subject since Charles B. Heiser’s 1979 seminal tome, “The Gourd Book.” Heiser’s book doesn’t touch on the subject of human evolution (at least I don’t remember it doing so), focusing instead on the use of gourds in human history. Undoubtedly, the most fun part of the book is the stuff on gourds as penis display extensions, but the statement that caught my eye was that gourds were most likely the first domesticated plant, predating any foodstuffs.

Really?

I was already convinced of the aquatic side of human evolution, but a finding like this, if true, was a powerful piece of evidence in its favor. Now, a quarter of a century later I find a confirmation of Heiser’s statement. The Science Daily article purports that “This lightweight ‘container crop’ would have been particularly useful to human societies before the advent of pottery and settled village life, and was apparently domesticated thousands of years before any plant was domesticated for food purposes.” (Emphasis mine.)

Bingo!

But let me back up a second. This is, after all, post No. 1 for Ape Shit. An introduction is in order.

Simply put, I advocate a demographic approach to the question of human evolution. I believe that a study of the demographics of known human populations can allow us to reconstruct the primal habitat in which we evolved. To my knowledge, this approach is unique and hasn’t been posited elsewhere. There are too many ramifications and elements of the theory to cover it thoroughly in one post, so it will all have to come out in the wash, so to speak.

The guiding principle of the demographic theory is Occam’s Razor. The demographic theory is quantum leaps simpler than anything else proposed, which allows it the luxury of not having to prove aberrations. The various complexities proposed by the savanna school and its offspring, such as standing up to be in the cooling breezes or to carry food to ones mate, verge on the absurd and would generate ridicule were they not proposed by stalwarts of the academic community. That they continue to be put forth makes one shake ones head in amazement.

The only way the academic community has avoided capitulation to a variant of the AAT is by refusing to engage in a discussion with AAT supporters. If you don’t debate them, you can’t lose the debate. Duh!

Because there’s no way anyone can stand in front of an audience and claim that our ancestors’ response to the savanna was go out and behave in ways that no other animal in the history of the world ever behaved and in ways that would surely have gotten them killed, had they done so. You can only pull stuff like that for so long before some fresh-faced kid yells, “Hey, that penguin’s got no clothes.”

But I promised…

Back to the gourds.

Why gourds? Why domesticate gourds thousands of years before foodstuffs? In fact, some people question why start farming, at all? Apparently, if the record of gourds is correct, we knew how to farm thousands of years before we chose to farm something to eat. Why raise gourds and not food?

The demographic theory says, everyone lives by the water hole. We do now; we always have. We know that we all live by the water hole now; it is part of the human condition to have access to water wherever we are and at all times (more or less). To not have that access is to risk death. This is not necessarily true of other animals, and certainly not true of any other primate. We are unique in that regard. The water hole, bar, coffee klutch, is still, along with the hearth, the center of human socialization. Chimps don’t go hang out down at the water hole, but we always do. We consume far more water than any similar animal or other primate and likewise evacuate a unique and very dilute urine stream. The demographic theory assumes that the human condition as such is primordial. Nothing has changed since the beginning. We have always lived at the water hole.

Which means that for millions of years — well, ever since time began, really — we were stuck at the water hole, as much as a kingfisher is. We couldn’t leave; we had to have too much water too much of the time to get away from a freshwater source for any length of time.

Which was, truth to tell, not as bad as it sounds. For one thing, all the best food is down at the water’s edge, if not in the water itself. It seems, for instance, that we’ve always been fond of turtles and frogs and clams, as well as roots and nuts and berries; and they’re a lot easier to catch than squirrels or rabbits, not to mention monkeys.

Furthermore, being slow of foot, not good climbers, and plodding swimmers, we were safest down where the brush was thickest and the trees easiest to climb; or, if need be, we could jump in the water to avoid some predators. We weren’t great swimmers, but we were better than lions.

Good food, safe environment. Where do you think the smartest monkey on the block would set up camp? Don’t forget, for millions of years we were bipedal, small, slow, and completely unarmed, but clever. Not to mention that for those millions of early years there weren’t many savannas, anyway, but if we were caught out in the open, we were known as “lunch.” Given that food and safety were down on the bank and that we were a prime entrée out in the open, little wonder we stayed down by the water.

Or so the theory goes.

Living down by the water meant that food was rarely our great concern. We’ve always lived in the lush part of the environment. Which is why we could know about farming for thousands of years without being pressured into adopting it: we didn’t have to. We always lived among (relative) abundance.

But for good or ill, we were stuck there, as well, until…

Until we figured out how to carry water with us.

Bingo! Gourds!

Once we had gourds, we could escape the banks. We could travel. We could stay overnight somewhere. We could survive. Food we could find anywhere, but water was, and still is, precious. It makes perfect sense that the bottle gourd was the first domesticated plant, if everyone was stuck at the fountain. If we were living on the savanna, of course, raising bottle gourds wouldn’t make much sense, at all. Why drag around something you don’t need? And surely, if you’re a savanna resident, you don’t need a water bottle. You don’t see lions or gazelles with water bottles, do you? But if you didn’t really live on the savanna but rather lived down by the water hole and only hunted the savanna once you’d acquired weapons, then a water carrying device would have been a huge technological advance. You could see where people right away would start growing bottle gourds, the hell with rice and wheat and corn. You want to get up and get out of there, not sit down and grind grain for the rest of your life.

You can, by the way, think of bottle gourds at the gateway plant, much as marijuana was the gateway plant to the modern organic farming movement. It’s not well known outside the organic farming community, but many of them began their farming careers back in the 1960s and 70s as pot farmers; and only after they’d spent the effort learning how to grow quality marijuana did they turn their attention to the larder. Likewise, evidently, people grew bottle gourds for thousands of years before finally deciding that, if they were going to all that effort, they might as well try growing something else, at the same time. Indeed, it’s been known for some time that people were knowledgeable about food farming long before they took it up; which has generated the nagging question of why? What took people so long? If they’d known how to grow crops for thousands of years yet didn’t, what made them change their mind?

There is another side to the Science Daily article, though, that expands considerably on Heiser’s hypothesis. The gourd was brought to America from Asia, the researchers contend, “some 10,000 years ago.” Bruce Smith, co-author of the research paper says the these early immigrants “did not arrive here empty-handed; they brought a domesticated plant and dogs with them.” He doesn’t say “plants,” plural. Just “a domesticated plant.” The review article doesn’t cover cultivation requirements for the bottle gourd, but a University of Florida Web site does and adds the information that the bottle gourd “is the only crop known to have been cultivated in pre-Columbian times in both the Old and New World.” (A conclusion that is open to debate.) What I was interested in, though, was what kind of climate was required for growing bottle gourds, and the same site says they’re grown “from warm parts of the temperate zone throughout the dry and wet tropics.” The importance of that information is that implies that the gourd didn’t slowly travel up the Siberian and down the Alaskan coasts as people pushed into the Americas, but rather that it was most likely transported from one temperate zone to another an ocean away in one fell swoop. Quite what all that implies, boggles the mind. Essentially, what they’re saying is that 10,000 years ago someone deliberately schlepped some bottle gourd seeds from China to California (or thereabouts) for the purpose of planting them. Hmm? At the very least, it means that by 10,000 BPE the immigrants to the Americas were not just hunters and gatherers, but were already farmers. That’s a pretty big “at the very least.”

Furthermore, you can bet the farm that the 10,000 year old date is by no means a record of the earliest bottle gourd cultivation. That’s only the earliest date we currently have for its cultivation in the Americas. God only knows how long before that it was first cultivated in Africa before spreading to Asia and only then on to the Americas.

Well anyway, that’s how the demographic theory sees it. You have any better guesses? The savannistas won’t touch the issue with a ten-foot pipe. Why do you think the bottle gourd was so important?