The Aquatic Ape Theory and the Ganymede Hypothesis

The Ganymede Hypothesis and Elaine Morgan

The idea of modern humans evolving from hominids is simply not workable on the level of logic. For any hominid to have evolved into humans, that hominid would have to have lost:
• His fur while ice ages were going on.
• Almost all of his night vision while living in the perpetual twilight of the “Purple Dawn” age and while surrounded by predators which could see very nicely in the dark.
• Almost all of his sense of smell while trying to survive as a land prey animal.

If any of those losses by itself would have been less than fatal, the combination of them would certainly have been fatal.

None of the evidence that we actually have is compatible with the idea of humans evolving from hominids on earth.

Again, having a sense of smell no better than humans possess would be fatal for any land prey animal. Notice however that aquatic mammals do not really require much of a sense of smell. Elaine Morgan listed a hundred or so traitsi which we share with other aquatic mammals but there are a few which stand out:
• Voluntary control of breathing which is an adaptation for swimming and diving. We take that for granted but monkeys and apes do not have it. That is the only reason they cannot teach chimps and gorillas to speak English (they can be taught to communicate using deaf signs perfectly well).
• Face to face sex. Marine mammals do that, land animals generally don't.
• Shoulders adapted for swim strokes. The motion to swim is the same as to throw something like a javelin or use an atlatl. Humans have that, primates and hominids never did. That is why Neanderthals were limited to thrusting spears while early humans had atlatls and javelins.
• Lack of a decent sense of smell.

Elaine Morgan's aquatic ape theory can be viewed two ways. Viewed as a new version of evolution, it doesn’t really work. Viewed as a theory of human adaptation, it is the best theory that has ever been put forward, but it has never gotten any traction in academia and there are two reasons for that:
• There is no fossil evidence of any sort of an aquatic ape ever having lived on this planet, and
• There has never been a body of water on this planet which would be safe for humans to live in. You only need to spend 15 minutes in the ancient sea monster section of any large museum to comprehend why humans never lived in water on Earth in prehistoric times.

Perfectly good theory, it just needs a different kind of a world to happen on. That is again what we noticed with the question of the sudden appearance of Cro-Magnon people on earth with all their fancy tools, weaponry, and artwork seemingly in place from the first day. It seems that the search for a believable home world for modern humans within our system is always going to lead away from this particular planet (Earth).
An original human home world would need four things:

1. It would have to be bright (the relatively tiny human eyes).
2. It would have to be warm (the lack of fur).
3. It would have to be wet (the aquatic adaptations) and
4. It would have to be safe, both from sea monsters and from cosmic radiation.

For a number of reasons, neither Mars nor Earth would have been a candidate for such a thing in prehistoric times. Nonetheless, there was in fact one place within our system that would have been such a candidate. Under present conditions with Jupiter well outside of the so-called habitable zone of our system, Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede, is a frozen wasteland. Several tens of thousands of years ago, with Jupiter in a much closer orbit as is the normal case for gas giant planets or dwarf stars aligned with a main sequence star such as our sun, Ganymede would have been a freshwater ocean world with both islands and floating bergs and coagulated masses of pumice, which is actually lighter than water.

All of that, of course, completely wrecks the entire idea of modern humans having evolved from hominids here on Earth. Scientists and scholars investigating the case of Feldhofer 1 assumed that they were seeing a missing link, part of an evolutionary continuum between apes and modern humans. That was due mainly to the zeitgeist of the age and not to anything that you might call sound logical reasoning or good scientific methodology.

What they had actually discovered was the apex creature for dark worlds, humans being the apex creature for bright worlds such as Ganymede was in prehistoric times and such as Earth is now. The question of the Neanderthal is one facet of the Ganymede Hypothesis; there is obviously a great deal more to the story than that.

The Ganymede Hypothesis answers the question of where and under what kinds of conditions the first humans within our system lived. It does not answer the question of how or when life forms first came to our system, or where, how, or when he first humans ever to live in the universe were living.