---
title: "Aquatic ape hypothesis"
chunk: 3/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquatic_ape_hypothesis"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:09:03.054964+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Critiques ===
The AAH is considered to be a classic example of pseudoscience among the scholarly community, and has been met with significant skepticism. The Nature editor and paleontologist Henry Gee has argued that the hypothesis has equivalent merit to creationism, and should be similarly dismissed.
In a 1997 critique, anthropologist John Langdon considered the AAH under the heading of an "umbrella hypothesis" and argued that the difficulty of ever disproving such a thing meant that although the idea has the appearance of being a parsimonious explanation, it actually was no more powerful an explanation than the null hypothesis that human evolution is not particularly guided by interaction with bodies of water. Langdon argued that however popular the idea was with the public, the "umbrella" nature of the idea means that it cannot serve as a proper scientific hypothesis. Langdon also objected to Morgan's blanket opposition to the "savannah hypothesis" which he took to be the "collective discipline of paleoanthropology". He observed that some anthropologists had regarded the idea as not worth the trouble of a rebuttal. In addition, the evidence cited by AAH proponents mostly concerned developments in soft tissue anatomy and physiology, whilst paleoanthropologists rarely speculated on evolutionary development of anatomy beyond the musculoskeletal system and brain size as revealed in fossils. After a brief description of the issues under 26 different headings, he produced a summary critique of these with mainly negative judgments. His main conclusion was that the AAH was unlikely ever to be disproved on the basis of comparative anatomy, and that the one body of data that could potentially disprove it was the fossil record.
In a blog post originally published in 2005 and continually updated since, anthropologist John D. Hawks said that anthropologists don't accept the AAH for several reasons. Hardy and Morgan situated the alleged aquatic period of human nature in a period of the fossil record that is now known not to contain any aquatic ancestors. The traits the AAH tries to explain actually evolved at wildly different time periods. The AAH claims that the alleged aquatic nature of humanity is responsible for human patterns of hair, fat, and sweat, but actually all of these things are similar in humans to other primates. To the extent they are exceptional in any primate relative to other primates, or in primates relative to other mammals, they are exceptional for well-understood thermodynamic reasons.
Palaeontologist Riley Black concurred with the pseudoscience label, and described the AAH as a "classic case of picking evidence that fits a preconceived conclusion and ignoring everything else". Physical anthropologist Eugenie Scott has described the aquatic ape hypothesis as an instance of "crank anthropology" akin to other pseudoscientific ideas in anthropology such as alien-human interbreeding and Bigfoot.
In The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution (2013), Henry Gee remarked on how a seafood diet can aid in the development of the human brain. He nevertheless criticized the AAH because "it's always a problem identifying features [such as body fat and hairlessness] that humans have now and inferring that they must have had some adaptive value in the past." Also "it's notoriously hard to infer habits [such as swimming] from anatomical structures".
Popular support for the AAH has become an embarrassment to some anthropologists, who want to explore the effects of water on human evolution without engaging with the AAH, which they consider "emphasizes adaptations to deep water (or at least underwater) conditions". Foley and Lahr suggest that "to flirt with anything watery in paleoanthropology can be misinterpreted", but argue "there is little doubt that throughout our evolution we have made extensive use of terrestrial habitats adjacent to fresh water, since we are, like many other terrestrial mammals, a heavily water-dependent species." But they allege that "under pressure from the mainstream, AAH supporters tended to flee from the core arguments of Hardy and Morgan towards a more generalized emphasis on fishy things."
In "The Waterside Ape", a pair of 2016 BBC Radio documentaries, David Attenborough discussed what he thought was a "move towards mainstream acceptance" for the AAH in the light of new research findings. He interviewed scientists supportive of the idea, including Kathlyn Stewart and Michael Crawford who had published papers in a special issue of the Journal of Human Evolution on "The Role of Freshwater and Marine Resources in the Evolution of the Human Diet, Brain and Behavior". Responding to the documentaries in a newspaper article, paleoanthropologist Alice Roberts criticized Attenborough's promotion of AAH and dismissed the idea as a distraction "from the emerging story of human evolution that is more interesting and complex". She argued that AAH had become "a theory of everything" that is simultaneously "too extravagant and too simple".
Philosopher Daniel Dennett, in his discussion of evolutionary philosophy, commented "During the last few years, when I have found myself in the company of distinguished biologists, evolutionary theorists, paleoanthropologists and other experts, I have often asked them to tell me, please, exactly why Elaine Morgan must be wrong about the aquatic theory. I haven't yet had a reply worth mentioning, aside from those who admit, with a twinkle in their eyes, that they have also wondered the same thing." He challenged both Elaine Morgan and the scientific establishment in that "Both sides are indulging in adapt[at]ionist Just So stories". Along the same lines, historian Erika Lorraine Milam noted that independent of Morgan's work, certain standard explanations of human development in paleoanthropology have been roundly criticized for lacking evidence, while being based on sexist assumptions. Anatomy lecturer Bruce Charlton gave Morgan's book Scars of Evolution an enthusiastic review in the British Medical Journal in 1991, calling it "exceptionally well written" and "a good piece of science".
In 1995, paleoanthropologist Phillip Tobias declared that the savannah hypothesis was dead, because the open conditions did not exist when humanity's precursors stood upright and that therefore the conclusions of the Valkenburg conference were no longer valid. Tobias praised Morgan's book Scars of Evolution as a "remarkable book", though he said that he did not agree with all of it. Tobias and his student further criticised the orthodox hypothesis by arguing that the coming out of the forest of man's precursors had been an unexamined assumption of evolution since the days of Lamarck, and followed by Darwin, Wallace and Haeckel, well before Raymond Dart used it.