It leaves me so dumbfounded to see not just you write such a thing. Would you seriously claim that AAH does not live up to that??? You might as well have pointed to a car with four wheels and say, "See, it doesn't have four wheels".
(No wonder Lewis Black screams at the world...)
I put it to you that the aquatic evidence exists in the fossil records, that it's no problem finding it, and that several have already pointed to it. But no references point to it. It's already out there, and there's nothing but walls of silence.
They ask for fossil evidence, they are being handed it, and still it isn't enough. What the hell do they want?!?
Yes, I claim that they do in this case. It is Wegener anew.
I'll give you this: Since day one, this hypothesis has had a history of circumstantial evidence. It's all physical and etological comparison between modern man and generalized characteristics from the animal kingdom. All quite simple and somewhat childish.
But Wegener did exactly the same. All he had to go for from 1910 and for the next 20 years was a hunch. All he did was look at a Greenlandic landscape and compare it with measurements of the exact same landscape from 50 years earlier, finding discrepancies. Followed up with him looking at a world map going: 'Wow, the coast lines of South America and Africa looks exactly like pieces in a giant puzzle. Maybe they were once long ago attached to each other'.
What a childish thought, and that was all there was for decades. Wegener met nothing but closed doors the rest of his life, constantly getting the question: "What the hell would be the mechanism behind something so ridiculous?" All somebody had to say was 'radio activity?', and suddenly the evidence popped out everywhere.
And Wegener even had his numbers screwed up, so he thought the continents move much faster than science concludes today. But his general notion was correct and it was provable. Even if Hardy or Morgan has screwed up a detail here and there too (which is very likely), the general notion may still be correct. And those that could easily correct which ever errors and give clarity in the best interest of, you know, "science", they are just laughing at the conclusion, more or less only because it would be ... revolutionary.
(And then everobody sees Erich von Däniken and Dan Brown, so maybe I shouldn't blame people as such.)
And yes, I claim that the fossil evidence for AAH exists in abundance and screams at us from the drawers in the institutes. Anoiapithecus, Oreopithecus, Ardipithecus, all the australopitheci and homo, it's all out there. But the proper people can't stop laughing at the conclusion long enough to go look at the fossils in this new light. Because they can't or won't deal with the conclusion.
For the life of me, I don't understand why physical anthropology seems to be so frowned upon, while it seems to be absolutely no problem within zoology. Zoologists looks at the modern elephant, defines a semi-aquatic hypothesis behind its current appearance and goes looking for fossil evidence for such a silly notion. They have no problem finding it in the Moeritherium while studying its teeth. This ridiculous finding gets published and generally accepted without any God damned problem! But somebody suggests exactly the same with another African mammal, a primate that just so happens ended in us, and everybody looses their minds and shoves it into the pseudoscience category.
Because the only difference between paleoanthropology and paleozoology is that the former is about ... us, their working methods would be assumed to be identical. But in practicality, they aren't. Because it's about ourselves, and then basic biology is suddenly not good enough. One could get the impression, that anthropologists don't work with the notion that of course we are subject to exactly the same biological rules as everything else in the animal kingdom. Otherwise, they would have embraced this splash-splash notion long ago and sought out the evidence. Then it seems that our own biology still dictates to us that we have to be special in the animal kingdom. Even though ever since Darwin Ockham's Razor would indicate that we are ... not.
Then anthropologists are just like physicists that try to study quantum mechanics and inevitably influence the tests and distort the measurements. Then it seems this principle get extrapolated onto anthropologists that attempt to study themselves, and their own biology blurs their conclusions.
That's the only sense I can make of all this chaos surrounding the AAH, that otherwise would be ... a no brainer.
Funny you should mention kidneys processing salt water.
Your mama, right back at you.
You think I don't read all this stuff? I don't want to be wrong.
They need to go look for it in the Sahara as much as in East Africa. Along those old river bed valleys (eg. where Toumaï was found), that were much greener in late miocene (13-5 million years ago). That's where the aquatic ape developed, across a giant region from Southern Europe to East Africa. In the dry Paradise Lost, if you will. (Anyway, that's one suggestion...)
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