Nutty professors are the greatest!
Chris it would be an utterly boring world if were to have no uniqueness, and were all in agreement lookalikes. We would not learn much either, and be in fact arrested in development. So though I'm not super passionate about the subject, I do appreciate your efforts! They have me questioning and thinking. Perhaps you could assemble the new key info and make a little youtube series out of it, just for fun, keeping your editing skills up.
I must say I'm missing some visuals in this thread, a few pictures would spice it up
Basically this new info you're suggesting is listed in the first post (or, it's not really new any of it, it's a contemporary summarization commemorating fifty years after the initial suggestion of the idea).
I'll give you the one key aquatic ape argument, that have probably closed the deal once and for all, which is the argument about the human brain's unique nutritional requirements (unique from the other great apes, chimps, gorillas, orangutans, etc.). The human brain has grown exponentially throughout our evolution while our cousins have grown very little comparitively, and also while mammal species adapting to grasslands all (all!) reduce their brain size comparitively, because the nutrition to sustain it just aren't there.
Primarily, the modern brain of Homo sapiens (us) needs fat to both fully develop and sustain itself throughout our life, and not just any fat. It needs specific Omega fatty acids (3, especially) and in particular Iodine ions. These two exact substances are in combination close to impossible to garner in adequate measures even through a varied terrestrial diet, but guess where they are both abundant? In seafood. To the point, where it just can't be refuted that this would've most likely been the diet we are naturally adapted to find in our original habitat; Fish, shellfish, seaweeds, riparian sedges, those kind of foods.
And yet, that's exactly what too many anthropologists are still clinging on to. "We probably got those through a terrestrial diet somehow." At the same time when WHO today observes that somewheres between 1 and 2 billion (billion!) Homo sapienses suffer from Iodine deficiency, causing endemic goiter many places (this is why you have Iodine in the salt from your local supermarket, Westerners). Upwards of two sevenths of the entire human population, this increasingly agricultural ape for the last 10.000 years, are nowhere near the correct intake of Iodine. Most likely because today, most of us do eat terrestrials foods and not aquatic as we were arguably adapted to originally (this because agriculture makes it a lot easier to produce a buck load of carbohydrates and animal fats and proteines, obviously).
Not parsimonous at all to keep clinging onto a fable about the human brain having fed off a fully terrestrial diet for five million years of biological evolution. It's downright stupid to keep considering that option, when you see the clear trend in the mammalian kingdom of e.g. a zebra on the African savannah having a brain of some 350 grams, while a dolphin of roughly the same size, which have adapted to sea food across 50 million years, have a brain of some 1800 grams. That's the mammalian trend; The wetter, the smarter.
So basically, if you guys want to better your brain, eat seafood.
Just this one aquatic ape argument is enough to end this bizarre wall from contemporary anthropology, especially when coupled with all the other observations pointing to humans being the 'wet' ape. Furlessness, upright bipedalism, speech, habitat affinity (beaches, right?), bathing affinity, the shape and function of the human spleen and kidneys, swimming and diving potential, and yes, the benefits of water birth. Just this one brain argument is enough to take it home and is well over a decade old, and yet it doesn't seem to penetrate the ivory towers of Academia. For seemingly no scientific reason. It's stupid, stupid, stupid, and demeaning to their own field.
People compare this idea a lot with Alfred Wegener's suggestion about continental drift (and I agree). This was proposed in 1913, not by a geologist, but by a meteorologist, and that was probably most of the reason why geology didn't really see the major point in pursuing the evidence for such a stupid concept for close to half a century. Mostly because of social crap coupled with fear of ruining their personal carreers. When they finally did, when those submarines filmed the bottom of the Atlantic ocean and saw the parting sea floor with hot lava coming up from the Earth's core, they knew that damn weatherman had been spot on, and they were embarassed and started to babble that they knew it all along. And I'm sure that when anthropology one day will finally act right towards their own giants (where one of them is past 90 now), they'll say the same crap.
(Breathing in ...)
(Just to add some imagery of this perceived aquatic ape ...)
