Aquatic Ape Theory
The hypothesis was initially proposed by the marine biologist Alister Hardy in 1960:
Definition
“My thesis is that a branch of this primitive ape-stock was forced by competition from life in the trees to feed on the sea-shores and to hunt for food, shell fish, sea-urchins etc., in the shallow waters off the coast. I suppose that they were forced into the water just as we have seen happen in so many other groups of terrestrial animals. I am imagining this happening in the warmer parts of the world, in the tropical seas where Man could stand being in the water for relatively long periods, that is, several hours at a stretch.”
Reasons to believe this hypothesis:
• Humans lack of body hair as being analogous to the same lack seen in whales and hippopotamuses,and noted the layer of subcutaneous fat humans have that Hardy believed other apes lacked, although it has been shown that captive apes with ample access to food have levels of subcutaneous fat similar to humans.
•The location of the trachea in the throat rather than the nasal cavity, the human propensity for front-facing copulation, tears and eccrine sweating, though these claimed pieces of evidence have alternative evolutionary adaptationist explanations that do not invoke an aquatic context.
•Bipedalism evolved first as an aid to wading before becoming the usual means of human locomotion,and tool use evolved out of the use of rocks to crack open shellfish.
Reasons to reject this hypothesis:
•The mechanism of sweating in humans is especially wasteful of water--a rare commodity in the hot savanna
•Other medium-sized mammals in the hot savanna environment do not use this mechanism of heat loss
•The loss of fur has required the development of a significantly costly form of insulation for the human body, a relatively thick layer of subcutaneous fat
•Paleontologists have never found fossil evidence of this aquatic ape.
•Hominids leading into the water sources available to them would have nothing to protect them from crocodiles and other large predators.
•There may be gaps in the fossil record, but it is unlikely that those gaps will be filled by new primates and entirely different from any known form in their ecology.
In conclusion
The world is covered by 71% of water,we have only explored 5% of the seas. So we won’t know in our existence what really has hid or still hides in there.