A Bone From a Dry Sea

NOTE

There were apes, walking on four legs, and millions of years later there were our human ancestors, walking on two. What happened in those millions of years to bring that about is still largely guess-work.

The Sea-ape theory is one of those guesses. Professional palaeontologists have tended to call it crack-pot, but some of them are beginning to agree that it at least needs a serious answer. Vinny mentions some of the arguments for it (our hairlessness, the fat beneath our skins, our hearts slowing when we dive, and so on). The chief arguments against it are that there aren’t any fossils, and there doesn’t seem to be enough time to fit that amount of evolution in. I would like to have written more about it, but I found it held the story up too much. Readers who are interested should look for Elaine Morgan’s books (The Descent of Woman; The Aquatic Ape; The Scars of Evolution). There is a discussion of it in The Aquatic Ape: Fact or Fiction? edited by Machteld Roede and others.

I have of course made up everything that Li and her people do in this story. There’s no evidence for that at all.

P.D.