From the Vault: Aquatic Humanoids, Part 2

From the sirens of 'The Odyssey' to 'The Creature From the Black Lagoon' and beyond, humans have always imagined their underwater doubles. In this two-part Stuff to Blow Your Mind exploration, Robert and Joe discuss the revealing myth and fiction of mermaids and gillmen -- as well as the aquatic ape theory and the biological possibilities of an aquatic humanoid.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday,
so that means it's time to venture into the vault
for a classic episode. That's right. This is the second
part of our our look at Aquatic Humanoids. This is
from January, and it's a look at everything from the
Sirens of the Odyssey to the creature from the Black Lagoon,

(00:28):
the Guild people from the the HP Leftcraft stories, and
it's going to get into territory explored by the recently
published sci fi podcast Transgenesis, which I wrote and created
along with the help of Alexander Williams, Lauren Vogelbaum, various
folks here at how stuff works in some very talented
people from outside the organization as well. Joe shows up

(00:49):
in the show at one point. I think I make
a creepy camey. You do, you may make an extended
creepy cameo. All ten episodes are gonna launch at once,
so that you can you can binge them. You can,
you can, you can spread them out over your commute,
you know, however you want to do it. You can
also find it online at Transgenesis dot Show. But it's
a sci fi podcast that has certain things to do

(01:09):
with the idea of deep sea intelligent life, deep sea
human ooid creatures, and that's the kind of thing that
we explore in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
That's right, So, without any further ado, I say, let's
go right to the episode. Welcome to Stuff to Blow
Your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, welcome

(01:37):
to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today is going to
be part two of a two part episode about the
aquatic humanoid. Now, last time we really focused on the
mythology and cultural beliefs about our aquatic counterparts, the humanoid
types who live in the depths and there this is
a trope all throughout fiction. You find it in all

(02:00):
kinds of human cultures. But one thing I think we
didn't discuss last time, or if we did, it's my
memory is not serving me well, is the movie Leviathan.
Oh Yes, one of the one of the several nineteen
eighty nine underwater peril movies that that we keep chatting about,
and at least in a previous episode, I'm not sure
if we we talked about it in The Aquatic Humanoids

(02:21):
Part one or not. We've talked about it so much recently,
I can't even recall when it happened. But anyway, Yeah,
so ninety nine you had James Cameron's The Abyss, but
you also had Deep Star six Leviathan, Lords of the Deep.
For some reason, everybody went nuts making underwater sci fi movies. Yeah,
we've been sort of trying to piece together in a

(02:42):
casual way. Why that was, you know, what what was
happening in the world was it did have to do
with that, with recent underwater exploration that really inspired everybody
at the same time. Or did everyone just know that
the Abyss was coming and it made sense for all
the various cinematic lamp preyest to converge upon it. Now,
Leviathan is a I think you'll back me up here,
a terrible movie, but a great terrible movie. It is. Uh,

(03:06):
it is a thoroughly enjoyable, flawed film. It's this the
type of bad movie that I just really eat up
that ends up in I think inspiring me more than
good underwater movies. Yeah, it's such an alien rip off
the DVD I had of it, it actually says alien
underwater that's the poll quote. Yeah, it is highly derivative.

(03:28):
But God that the cast is so good and the
look of the film, like it has a Stan Winston
Studios monster in it, so you know that's gonna look
like a million bucks. And the the overall sets that
are used, especially the interior sets for this underwater station,
are tremendous. Like the set does as much as the
cast does, really to create a sense of back story

(03:49):
for these characters. You know, in a way, the sleaziness
of Daniel Stearns performance in the movie is kind of
a set in its own. It's like a landscape of
sleeves and obnoxious nous. Yeah, he plays this sleazy character
named six Pack, I believe, and it's easy to think
back on the film and think that their moments where
the character reaches peak sleaziness, but he really just achieves

(04:11):
a high plateau of sleaziness throughout his time in the film. Okay,
let's not dwell on Leviathan too much, but it does
relate to what we're going to talk about today. So
today we wanted to address some of the biological ideas
about aquatic humanoids. And so one of the things in
Leviathan is you spoiler alert for this nineteen eighty nine

(04:33):
b movie. You find out that the Russians in the
movie are trying to create an aquatic humanoid through genetic alteration. Right,
of course, that ends up creating a monster. A monster
I should add that is in many ways kind of
an etheo centaur, of which we discussed in the first episode,
this sort of hybrid of different parts creating this this
kind of large centaur esque chimera. So, yeah, you've got

(04:58):
this giant monster that's basically got a at fish head
and then it's got Daniel Stearn's face sticking out of
its back and some other random tentacles and lampreys poking
off of it. But this was, in the context of
the film, an attempt to create Homo aquaticus, the human
version of an underwater creature, or maybe the underwater version
of the human today. We want to look at could

(05:20):
such a creature exist, and what would it look like biologically,
and if aquatic humanoids could exist in reality, how would
they figure into our our picture of human evolution. Yeah,
it's it's a fascinating question. Of course, the you know
the the The easy answer is, of course, yes, all
life came from the sea, and we have plenty of

(05:42):
cases of terrestrial life returning to the sea, so we're
not talking about just complete whackadoodle ideas about about life
emerging from one or descending into the other. Right, you
are correct to point out that that leaving the water
for terrestrial existence can happen, and then leaving terrestria is
that the now, and I guess leaving the land for

(06:02):
a watery existence can also happen. These are totally biologically
plausible scenarios and they happen all the time. But could
it happen with us? And in fact, has it already
happened with us? So I guess it's time to venture
into something that people have asked us to discuss on
the show before. We we've never done it before. But
it is a fringe hypothesis and human evolution called the

(06:26):
aquatic ape hypothesis. Yes, and and of course that instantly
summons the images of a guerrilla mermaid. I will not
I will not try to convince you to dismiss that
that apparition from your mind, but but it is almost
impossible not to think of that So now you're saying,
like fish tail with guerrilla top, yes, not like not

(06:47):
like Mermaid top with guerrilla legs. No, no, no fish
fish on the bottom. Uh, silver back grilla on the top.
That's the only way to put it together, Marilla. Yeah,
not exactly, but close. Now, before we get into the
specifics of the hypothesis, I just want to start by
cautioning that this is not a hypothesis that is widely
accepted by scientists or biologists. It's generally frowned upon by

(07:10):
paleo anthropologists and other people who study the history of
human evolution. But I think it's worth addressing, especially since
people have asked about it before, and it fits into
this model of the aquatic humanoid and creates at least
a plausible sounding scenario in which there could have been
an aquatic humanoid. Yeah, if we entered into it as
a as an alternate hypothesis, If we enter into it

(07:33):
as a thought experiment, and we do not enter into
it trying to make an argument for the existence of
Triton's or or mer people or some sort of underwater race,
then I think we're in safe waters. Okay, So it
starts with a simple observation. Our closest relatives in the
animal kingdom are the other great apes, also known as
hamanids or the family Homonida. This includes orangutans, guerrillas, chimpanzees,

(07:58):
and binobos, and metically we are extremely similar to these animals,
especially to chimpanzees and binobo's. Anatomically we're also extremely similar
to them if you look at all of our body
parts in the way they fit together, were very very
close to these animals. But there are a few key differences,
and some of the most major of these key differences

(08:20):
are that we are mostly hairless bipeds, were naked, smooth skinned,
and we walk on two legs. And meanwhile, all these
other animals are hairy quadrupeds. They're covered from head to
toe in in hair for and usually walk on four legs.
So why that difference? What happened in the history of

(08:41):
only the human branch of this family to drive our
ancestors to become relatively smooth and bipedal while the rest
of our closest cousins didn't. Now just a note, I've
often seen this framed in terms of questions like, quote,
how did we get from chimpanzees to human ends. That
question is obviously nonsense, because we didn't get from chimpanzees

(09:04):
to humans. Both chimpanzees and humans came from something that
lived more than four million years ago. Chimpanzees are our cousins,
not our ancestors. But the question is why do humans
look different from them and from every other hominid, given
that were such close cousins. Well, in March nineteen sixty
a British marine biologist named Alistair Hardy published an article

(09:26):
and New Scientists arguing for a pretty startling answer to this.
Hardy said, in the distant past, our ancestors distinguished themselves
from the other great apes or the other great ape
ancestors by becoming an aquatic organism. So the idea here's
our ancestors adapted to life in the water for a
while and then returned to land exactly, and that that

(09:48):
shaped the differences between humans today and the other great apes.
And so in this article, Hardy summarized his hypothesis about
how quote Man's immediate ancestors diverged from quote more ape
like forms as follows. My thesis is that a branch
of this primitive ape stock was forced by competition from

(10:09):
life in the trees to feed on the seashores and
to hunt for food shellfish, sea urchins, et cetera. 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'm
imagining this happening in the warmer parts of the world,

(10:30):
in the tropical seas, where man could stand being in
the water for relatively long periods, that is, several hours
at a stretch. I imagine him waiting at first, perhaps
still crouching almost on all fours, groping about in the water,
digging for shellfish, but becoming gradually more adept at swimming.
Then in time I see him becoming more and more

(10:52):
of an aquatic animal, going farther out from the shore.
I see him diving for shellfish, prizing out worms, burrowing
crabs and bivalves from the sands at the bottom of
shallow seas, and breaking open sea urchins, and then with
increasing skill, capturing fish with his hands. And of course
this matches up the what we know about human cultures

(11:13):
that have a legacy of existing close to the sea
and upon the sea. Yeah, now this is describing what
we might call a semi aquatic existence rather than a
fully aquatic existence. Right, So it's not that we became
whales and lived entirely in the water, but that the
hypothesis is that we sort of became like Homo beachicus,

(11:35):
that we live adjacent to the water and spent a
whole lot of time in it. Homo beach bummocus, Homo
biwa chicas. I like it. Now, this might sound crazy,
and as we said, it is certainly not accepted by
mainstream biologists or paleo anthropologists. But I want to say
that there's nothing in principle wrong with the idea of

(11:56):
a land dwelling mammal evolving to become an aquatic creature.
We mentioned this earlier, but just to reiterate, like, where
do you think whales and dolphins came from? More than
fifty million years ago? The ancestors of whales and dolphins
were four legged, land dwelling mammals that went through many
stages of evolution deeper and deeper into the water. They
started as these creatures that lived adjacent to the water

(12:19):
and spent more and more time in the water over
the generations, becoming more and more adapted to it from
the semi aquatic waiting lifestyle of pacacidas and into high
us to like this more otter like existence of this
creature called ambulositis, and then eventually two creatures like the
Dora don which start to look sort of like modern

(12:40):
whales with eyes on the side and the breathing hole
dorsally migrated up toward the top of the head. And
there's a similar story with pinnipeds like seals and sea lions.
They're believed to have evolved from land dwelling quadrupeds that
were something more like bears or musta Lloyd's meaning things
like skunks, raccoons, or weasels. So evolution of land dwelling

(13:01):
mammals into water dwelling mammals is not only possible, it
has happened lots of times. This is something that's totally
biologically plausible. The plausibility of that scenario is not something
that's necessarily a problem with the aquatic ape hypothesis. The
problems come in later because what's the real question? Did
it specifically happen to our ancestors? Right? Because if it,

(13:24):
if it did happen, we should be able to find
some evidence of it. Right. So, as we said this,
this hypothesis is not popular with scientists and experts in
the field, but it has really continued to capture the
interest of the public since it was first introduced. So
it was first proposed by, as we said, the British
marine biologist Alastair Hardy in nineteen sixty but it was
really most popularized by a Welsh author named Elaine Morgan

(13:48):
in the nineteen seventies and eighties, primarily through she She
wrote about it in a book called The Descent of Woman,
but then also in a book called The Aquatic Ape
and so more. His argument for the aquatic a hypothesis
is interesting, and she she summarized it in a TED
talk in two thousand nine before she passed away in
two thousand thirteen. And so I think maybe we should

(14:10):
look at some of the specifics of her argument. Uh
so then we can we can think about them and
see how they stack up. All right, But before we
do that, let's take a quick break and when we
come back, we'll dive in to the aquatic ape theory
some more. Thank thank alright, we're back, all right. So
Morgan's talk has a lot of framing material in it,
where she sort of lays the context for her argument

(14:33):
by talking about the idea of paradigm shifts and science
and about how scientific consensus has often been wrong in
the past. That's absolutely true. Scientific consensus has very often
been disproved um. But one of the things I think
we should be cautious about is when you start to
hear somebody using that fact as an argument for their argument.

(14:56):
If you know what I mean, it's often the opening
argument of somebody who's about the some some some really
fringe theory on you. Right, So, it is true that
scientific consensus has often been wrong, but the fact that
it has often been wrong is not evidence that your
particular bucking of it is correct. Now, so what is

(15:17):
the evidence that Morgan presents for her hypothesis. Well, so,
first of all, she looks at the really obvious thing,
where's all the hair, right, the naked skin. When you
look for other mammals without body hair like us, they're
almost all, she says, water dwelling creatures, the doo gong,
the walrus, dolphins, whales, the hippopotamus, the manateee. Yeah. The

(15:40):
only other example that comes to mind is, of course
the naked mole ratum, which is also kind of a
special case given in it's a subterranean rodent that lives
with a with a hive like structure. Yes, she mentions
it actually, and then she says, wait a minute, Wait
a minute, what about the elephant. That's a land dwelling
mammal without much body hair. Morgan says, it turns out

(16:01):
that more recent studies have found that the elephant had
an aquatic ancestor. I looked this up to make sure
she's she's sort of correct about this. The elephants are
related to an ancient mammal called the more ethereum, which
apparently was semi aquatic lived in around swamps and rivers.
Maybe not necessarily a direct ancestor of the elephant, but

(16:22):
a very close ancient relative of elephants. She says, there's
a strong correlation between nakedness and water. There are some
hairy or furry mammals that do live in the water, right.
You can think of a few, Oh yeah, I mean
the otters, beavers. If you want to make a stretch,
you can even look at things like like the polar bear,
which does is not an aquatic mammal. Per se but

(16:44):
does spend a lot of time in the water and
is an adapted swimmer. Yeah, but there, she says, there
are almost no hairless or smooth mammals that do not
either live in the water or have fairly recent ancestors
that lived in the water. And she claims that the
only except and as we mentioned, is the naked Somalian
mole rat, which she says, quote never puts its nose

(17:05):
above the surface of the ground. Then there's the question
of bipedality, right, there's no real comparison in nature because
we're the only mammal that walks consistently on two legs.
According to Morgan, Yeah, you know, at times a cat
will rear up on two legs and look exceedingly creepy.
But but that's about it. It's four legs the rest
of the time. Now that's mammals. Of course, once you

(17:27):
start looking into birds and dinosaurs, of course you get
basically humanoids by this characteristic. But some four legged animals,
of course, as we say, can occasionally stand up on
two legs. When do our closest ape relatives walk on
two legs? Will Morgan claims there's only one circumstance when
they always walk on two legs, and it's when they're

(17:49):
wading through water. You should remember that, because I want
to take issue with that in a bit. Then she
she marshals some more evidence. She says that, how about
subcutaneous fat. Morgan says, we have a layer of fat
running underneath our skin, and other great apes don't have this.
They're fat is stored more internally around their kidneys and

(18:09):
so forth, And our fat is stored largely in this
layer under our skin, similar to other water dwelling animals,
kind of a blubber layer basically. Yeah. I mean, it's
kind of an unfair comparison to make here, but we've
all seen these images of a hairless gorilla and they're
just completely jacked, you know, they're just exceedingly ripped in ways.
It's like hilarious muscles comic book cover muscles. Yeah, that

(18:32):
it is a comic book of physique, and the kind
of which you you rarely see in in the average human.
Here's another one. She says, how about speech. This is
a pretty big difference, right, Oh yeah, I mean that's
the one of the defining properties of of humans. Yeah.
In fact, you know, there are a lot of people
who would make the case, including somebody we've had on

(18:54):
the show in the past. Friends at evolved that a
lot of the distinctions we try to make that really
separate humans and other animals by some hard line of division,
the linees a lot blurrier than you might think. But
one thing he sort of made allowances for is maybe
language that we that is the closest thing we've got
to like a real edge on other animals. And so

(19:16):
how come we can talk and other hominids can't. Well,
Morgan claims that the difference between a human and a
guerrilla is not in the speech producing organs of the
throat and the lungs, but in the ability to consciously
control the use of breath. And this is interesting to
me because I think I've asked this on the show before.
But why are some body processes controlled entirely by the

(19:40):
unconscious nervous system while others are conscious and others can
be toggled on and off between conscious and unconscious control,
Like you can't consciously toggle on and off your digestion
or your heart beat or your metabolism. But even though
most of the time you're breathing is unconscious and automatic,

(20:01):
you can take it over with your executive control and
consciously toggle your breath on and off if you want to,
Like what causes this difference? Yeah, I mean, if memory
serves me correctly, thinking back to our John C. Lily
episodes in the past, Uh, dolphins uh have such manual
control over their breathing that they can arguably decide to

(20:25):
just shut it down and to drown themselves. Yeah. Well,
I mean that would be an example that would sort
of go with her hypothesis, right. The idea is that, uh,
the only reason we would be able to evolve this
conscious control of our breath is if our past ancestors
were shaped by a selection pressure that favored the ability
to like hold the breath and dive underwater. She says,

(20:47):
this would explain a lot. I do think that's a
really interesting question of why we can do that. I'm
not sure I'm going to go along with her on
this being an exclusively human and aquatic mammal trade because
I don't know. I've seen videos of dogs diving deep
underwater and other mammals doing that. It seems that they
have some kind of ability to hold their breath and

(21:08):
they're not semi aquatic. Mammals. Yeah, I would agree with that. Okay,
another thing, she says, how about hydrodynamics, we are anatomically streamlined.
Do you ever think about why is the human body
basically a straight line? Why are we sort of dart
shaped where we can dive smoothly into the water? She says, quote,
try to imagine a gorilla diving into water. I think

(21:32):
I've seen it done in a cartoon. But that's about it. Well,
it's like a cannonball, right and make a big splash.
Morgan says, we're halfway between being a chimp into fish
and so Morgan, after marshaling this evidence, she says that
she wants to insist the idea is not lunatic fringe.
And I'd say I largely agree. I think it's probably wrong,

(21:54):
but I don't think it's like the ancient aliens hypothesis
or something. I think it is, and it straineous hypothesis
that that we don't really need to resort to, and
so it's not parsimonious. But I think it's like reasonable
to play around with this idea. Yeah, yeah, I would
agree it is certainly not ancient aliens. Uh, But there

(22:17):
are some some issues, some some problems and some gaps
that have not been filled in by uh fossil evidence
for example. Right, But the real question is, like, what
is the substance of the critique from biology and paleo anthropology.
Why would they not accept this hypothesis. So, starting with
a few answers, probably the biggest weakness for the hypothesis is,

(22:40):
and this might sound kind of silly when we say it,
but there's no direct evidence for it. There's no fossil
evidence whatsoever that we've ever had any instance of an
aquatic humanoid. Right, show me the remains of the aquatic humanoid,
and it is the directive, and we do not have
an answer. Yeah, nothing like that now. So this means

(23:01):
it's all inference and speculation. It doesn't make it necessarily
wrong because we're talking about the ancient past, and sometimes
when we're trying to figure stuff out about the ancient past,
we don't have direct evidence. Sometimes we're just in that
situation and all you've got is inference and speculation. So
you just try to find the best most plausible inferenceance
speculation to form your ideas around. But we have to

(23:25):
acknowledge that there is no direct evidence for it. And
so it's kind of in a weak starting place. Physical
evidence would make a huge difference. Now I came across
another criticism of the aquatic a hypothesis by the paleo
anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin Madison. Uh.
He runs a popular paleo anthropology blog, and he put
a post on his blog about this idea. Uh. Some

(23:48):
of the points he makes are are pretty interesting. One
of the things is that Hawks claims the aquatic ap
hypothesis is not parsimonious. Now, parsimony refers to the idea
of the number of assumptions you have to make without
evidence in order to entertain a hypothesis. So, for a
quick example, imagine you leave a sandwich sitting on your

(24:08):
desk at work. You walk away for a minute, you
come back, there is a human bite shaped chunk of
the sandwich missing. Okay, Now you look around, everybody's just
working like normal. No, no direct evidence of what happened.
So you have to make an inference. Right by the way,
I am picturing the scenario taking place in the movie Leviathan,

(24:29):
that those coworkers right, So, yeah, did did Daniel Stern
take a bite out of your sandwich or what happened.
Since there's no unusual behavior, no sign of anything wrong,
you've just got to come up with a hypothesis that
seems reasonable. Now, you could hypothesize that Daniel Stern or
another one of your co workers took a bite out
of the sandwich. Or you could hypothesize that a polar

(24:52):
bear snuck into your office undetected, and this was a
polar bear that had undergone a surgical body modification and
so that its mouth had an uncharacteristically human shaped bite,
and then it took a bite out of your sandwich
with its surgical human mouth, and it didn't like it,
and it snuck away without being noticed. Yeah, that that

(25:12):
explanation is is much further removed from reality and requires
a number of different steps to get there. But like
the aquatic a hypothesis, it's internally consistent, right, I mean,
there's nothing on the face of it that makes that impossible.
It's just it requires a bunch of extra assumptions. Yeah, well,
I mean, like one, it's it's basically like any investigation, right, Like,

(25:37):
if you were investigating an actual sandwich incident in your workplace,
it's far more likely that someone in the office, did
it than someone from a neighboring office who would have
a harder time accessing the location in which the sandwich
is stored. Yeah, then you'd also have to hypothesize them
sneaking in and all that. Right, And like, the further
away you get from the sandwich from your office, the

(26:01):
more to leap it becomes. Right. So the main reason
you'd favor the coworker hypothesis is that you have to
make many fewer assumptions without evidence to assume it. And
so at first glance, this kind of thinking can make
something like the aquatic a hypothesis look good actually, because hey,
wait a minute, it's just one assumption you have to
make in order to explain all this different stuff. But

(26:24):
the more you examine it, the more it becomes clear
that the aquatic a hypothesis actually requires a lot of
assumptions of things not in evidence that just sort of
get rolled up into one big scenario you're picturing. You
can say that all how about all evolutionary increments and
all steps in evolution of all creatures are caused by

(26:45):
the ghost of biology, which is a spirit that lives
in the sky that decides that a creature should change
and then makes little mutations to change it over time.
That's just one assumption that explains absolutely everything in biology.
But yeah, but it's a bit assumption that that defies
or at least goes beyond the laws of science. It's
like saying a ghost took a bite out of the sandwich.

(27:07):
It's only one step, but it's a step that that
goes beyond, uh, the scientific understanding of the workplace or
the world itself. But then actually Hawks makes another point
that I think is a crucial extension of this idea.
So it's not just what we've already mentioned about some
types of assumptions appearing parsimonious but actually requiring a lot

(27:29):
of assumptions even though they only seem to be one scenario.
Hawks actually shows a second way that it's not parsimonious,
and he writes, quote, certainly, it makes sense that hominids
would develop new anatomies to adapt to such an alien environment.
He's talking about adapting to the water. But once those
hominids return to land, forsaking their aquatic homeland, the same

(27:51):
features that were adaptive in the water would now be
maladaptive on land. What would prevent those hominids from reverting
to the features of their land based ancestors, as well
as nearly every other medium sized land mammal. More than
simple phylogenetic inertia is required to explain this, since the
very reasons that the aquatic ape theory rejects the savannah

(28:13):
model would apply to the descendants of the aquatic apes
once they moved to the savannah. This is far from trivial,
since fossil hominids did inhabit open woodland starting by eight
million years ago and did move to the open savannah
by three million years ago. Okay, so the idea here
is that want you could maybe reasonably make the argument

(28:34):
that all right, the aquatic humanoids move out of the water,
but they're still living close enough to the water. There's
still going in the water. Uh, you know, there's still
a coastal species. You can say, well, maybe they retain
some of those features. But if they're moving further inland,
if they're becoming an inland species of savannah species, then
they wouldn't need those adaptations anymore. The the the economy

(28:54):
of natural selection would drive those away. Yeah. One thing
to be clear about here is that a very commonly
still believed but actually now obsolete. Hypothesis is the idea
that anatomical modernity in human beings evolved on the savannah,
that we became basically the animals we are now on
the savannah landscape. That used to be believed, and now

(29:16):
that's not true anymore. What what generally is believed is
that we became basically Homo sapiens in a woodland environment
in some you know, basically a tree oriented existence, and
then later moved to the savannah. Now, the aquatic a
hypothesis is saying, no, somewhere in there, before we got
to the savannah, we were in the water if if

(29:38):
that's true, though, we eventually moved back to the savannah,
and these traits that we've still got had to somehow
be adaptive to the savannah. So why aren't you just
assuming that they're the traits that were adaptive on the savannah. Yeah,
this is this is a strong point. Yeah, and so
to continue, hawks says quote. In other words, the aquatic

(29:58):
ape theory exp blaines all of these features, but it
explains them all twice. Every one of the features encompassed
by the theory still requires a reason for it to
be maintained after hominids left the aquatic environment. So it
feels like it becomes less of an exercise and explaining

(30:18):
what we are with this aquatic explanation, and it becomes
more about shoehorning the aquatic period into our evolutionary history.
Another thing I think we should do is just look
a little bit closer at some of those individual planks
of the argument that people like Hardy and Morgan brought up,
because a lot of them they sound so synsical, right,
They sound very, very truthy at a distance, but they

(30:41):
become a lot weaker, I think once you start looking
up close at them. For example, the idea of hairlessness. Right,
Morgan talks about the strong link between aquatic existence in
mammals and hairlessness. Now, first of all, I think it's
worth pointing out that we are not hairless. It's true.

(31:01):
We do have hair, some more than others, but it's there. Yeah,
Our body hair coverage is not total. It's not nearly
at the level of the other great apes, but neither
is the body hair coat. You know, the body hair
coverage of other great apes is also not total. Our
hair patterns are different, but we do still have a
pretty decent amount of natural body hair. Also, the distinction
between hairy land dwelling mammals and smooth aquatic mammals isn't

(31:24):
as start stark as Morgan suggests. Now she does to
be fair acknowledge otters and stuff like that, But there
are also so many other hairy and furry semi aquatic mammals.
We mentioned furry beavers, but there's also the furry platypus,
the water opossum, which is furry alan swamp monkey, which
is native Central Africa. It's covered in brown, gray, and

(31:46):
green fur. Semi Aquatic cats, semi aquatic her pestids like
the crab eating mongoose. You've got polar bears that we
mentioned earlier. You've got water diving bats. So a semi
aquatic lifestyle clearly doesn't always lead to the loss of
hair or fur. Furthermore, there are other hypotheses that could

(32:07):
explain why we have relatively less hair than our closest relatives.
So there was an explainer in Scientific American where a
researcher named Mark Pagel, the head of the Evolutionary biology
group at the University of Reading in England and the
editor of the Encyclopedia of Evolution explained some recent thinking.
One of the most common ideas about why humans lost

(32:29):
a lot of their body hair has to do with thermoregulation.
It says we lost a lot of body hair because
we needed a better way to keep cool. Now, this
could have been a pressure introduced by other changes in
our ancestors survival needs. Maybe if we migrated from a
cooler climate like underneath a thick tree canopy to a
hotter climate like an open sun exposed woodland or a savannah,

(32:53):
we might need to lose the hair. Or if our
survival niche became more oriented around intense prolonged exercise, such
as the prolonged chasing of prey animals. Yeah, exactly. Another explanation.
This one's pretty interesting to me. Parasite resistance. Oh yeah,
because when you think of of animals with hair, you

(33:14):
think of the various nasty parasites that can be crawling
around in there. I mean, we've talked about the the
extent to which mammalian, especially primate social bonding is based
around grooming, sitting around and picking stuff out of other
people's hair. Yeah, and you think of the constant thread
of lice. I mean, my child is in an elementary school,

(33:35):
so that the threat of that the head lies explosion
uh is always there. Uh. So by by losing the
body here, we've kind of what driven the lice to
the head in the pubic region, right, Yeah, I mean
they should solve that by having just like grooming time
where the kids sit around and pick lice out of
each other's hair. They probably go for that. Kids are

(33:56):
chriss So Pagel and a colleague named Walter bottom Or
published research in two thousand three in Royal Society Biology
Letters supporting the hypothesis that we lost our body hair
to protect ourselves against parasites as as we all know.
You know, ticks and lice and biting flies. They all
make this happy home in thick body hair. They love it.

(34:18):
And these ectoparasites are not only annoying, they can spread disease.
Like we don't want our kids to get lice, but
lots of these kinds of parasites are are worse than lice.
They can give you something that will kill you. Yeah,
I just I'll direct our listeners back to our episode
on on on ticks if you want some more information there.

(34:39):
But here's something interesting to think about. Once our ancient
ancestors could build fires and construct clothing, suddenly they just
did not need as much hair to keep warm at
night when it got cold. But the hair could still
serve as a refuge for these disease spreading parasites. So
once you can build fires, and once you can wear

(35:01):
other animal skins and stuff is clothing, there would have
been a pressure against body hair, because body hair is
this parasite vulnerability without much comparative benefit to make up
for it. If you can keep warm anyway, why have
this parasite vulnerability hanging around. Yeah, Like when we were
talking about aquatic apes supposedly returning to the land, like

(35:24):
I instantly thought, well, when I get out of a shower,
I grab a towel. So perhaps you know, the the
naked ape emerges, it murders a hairy animal of some
pomp of some form, puts on its fur. Like it's
one thing to think of that, but then this, the
the use of fire technology, would be an even greater step. Yeah, So,
Pagel writes, quote, human lice infections, which are confined to

(35:47):
the hairy areas of our bodies, seem to support the
parasite hypothesis. Naked mole rats, animals that can be described
as resembling quote, overcooked sausages with buck teeth, also seem
to support the theory. They live underground in large colonies
in which parasites would be readily transmitted, but the combined
warmth of their bodies and the confined underground space probably

(36:10):
negate the problem of losing heat to cold air for
these animals, allowing them also to become naked. So the
same kind of like other warmth sources that could have
selected for body hair loss in humans, could also select
for body hair loss in naked mole rats, and then
there's a totally different kind of answer sexual selection. Sexual

(36:32):
selection occurs when a pressure on some type of trait
in the body is selected for, not because it provides
a survival advantage, but because members of the opposite sex
prefer to breed with people possessing that that trait, and so,
like the peacock's tail, relatively smooth and hairless skin could
have been selected for because it's a way to advertise

(36:55):
to mates that you have good health and a lack
of parasites. It's a way of showing off that you
don't have parasites on you. Yeah, I hadn't really thought
about that, but but yeah, you have a hairless, shirtless
so hominid walking around it showing showing itself off and saying, look,
do you how many bites do you see? How many?
How many crawling parasites do you? Say? None? I'm a

(37:16):
desirable mate, I mean good shape. Yeah, here's the question
I actually don't know the answer to this. Is there
a reason I can't think of hairy body builders? Is that, like,
is there a biological reason that like super muscle e
dudes don't have hair on their chests or do they
shave it off or what I think generally what's happening
is they're they're having it waxed, Yeah, so they can

(37:36):
better show off the muscles. I mean, there are plenty
of muscular Harry dudes. I mean you can do a
search on that and you will get some answers. But yeah,
but yeah, my understanding is that it's a it's about
waxing of the body hair so that you can show
off the muscle. I'm just thinking about like the movie
Pumping Iron, where there's just like it's just really really smooth.

(37:57):
Oh yeah, yeah, you those guys are waxing in Shathan.
I'm sure. Well, anyway, it's not clear to me that
there's an obvious winner among the proposed ideas about how
we lost our body hair. But uh, any any of
these are still viable ideas awaiting the arrival of new
supporting evidence. And so I don't see a reason that
the aquatic a hypothesis is like a better alternative that

(38:20):
you have to go to now to address another plank
of the argument, the bipedality like that's also a great
ongoing debate. The old theory, of course, was that we
had to stand up to see over tall grass on
the savannah. That's been debunked. Now we you know, we
were in a more woodland type environment when we when
we evolved bipedality. But anyway, what made us stand upright

(38:42):
in that woodland environment? Charles Darwin thought we might have
evolved bipedalism to free up our hands for tool use.
This seems unlikely, since there's fossil evidence for bipedalism from
before we have evidence of ancient tools. But there are
other ideas, like perhaps bipedalism emerged from a gathering lifestyle
where our ancestors began to walk on two legs so

(39:03):
they could use two arms to carry things. Uh. This
seems possible given observations that chimpanzees tend to walk on
two legs and use two arms to carry food items
that they consider rare or having great value. Now, going
back to Morgan's argument about bipedality, she says, you know,
wind to our closest tape, relatives walk on two legs.

(39:23):
She says, they always walk on two legs when they're
wading through water, and that's the only time they always
walk on two legs. Uh. This is apparently not true, because,
as we've said, like, chimpanzees will walk on two legs
and use two arms if they're carrying something valuable. Also,
I was like, well, let's let's see. I bet there's
video of gorillas wading through water on the internet. I

(39:44):
looked it up. Uh, nope, I mean, there are lots
of videos of guerrillas waiting in the water, and most
of the time they're doing it on four legs. I mean,
there are a few instances where they'd rear up on
two legs. Uh. So this doesn't totally disprove the hypothesis,
but it really kind of undermines this plank of it. Well,
I mean it makes sense because if you're going into
the water, there's a good chance you you want to

(40:06):
use your hands to feel for things. And granted primates
don't have exactly the same hand foot scenario is humans,
but you're probably going in there you want to feel
the feel around for the rocks. You want to feel
around for something that you're scavenging for, right, Yeah, exactly,
And so definitely guerillas will walk on four legs in
the water. I've seen it. But I guess we have

(40:27):
to come back to this question of like, obviously we
can't wholly judge. I mean, it's it's possible that something
like the aquatic ape hypothesis has some grain of truth
to it. But uh, if the biologists and paleo anthropologists
are correct that this hypothesis is wrong, it's not not parsimonious.
There's no reason to resort to it. Why is it

(40:48):
so tenacious? Like we have had lots of people right
to us and say, do the aquatic ape theory? You know,
we we want to hear about it. And it's not
that I don't think it's interesting to talk about, but
it's it's it's not really taken seriously by experts in
the field. So why is it so captivating in the
public imagination. Well, I think part of the answer is

(41:08):
our entire first episode, where we talked about our mythological
and fictional obsession with the idea of of humans that
live in the water, humans that live beneath the waves.
But there is a there is a deep cultural attraction
to that idea, and it kind of bleeds over into
aquatic aight theory sometimes. I mean even even in cases
when it's you know, it's not somebody saying, hey, I

(41:30):
think mermaids are real and here's some science to pack
it up, right. Yeah, it's one of it's kind of
a sticky hypothesis. It's one of those things that, like
I said, you know, I want to be fair to it.
I don't think it's like lunatic fringe. I don't think
it is ancient aliens, but I don't think there's a
good reason to resort to it. But it's one of
those things that's just so interesting to the mind. It's

(41:52):
so fun to picture and so fun to entertain that
it's sort of like overrides our sense of disinterest in
there things that seem, you know, not necessary to believe in. Uh.
There's actually a paper from nine in the Journal of
Human Evolution by John H. Langdon called Umbrella Hypotheses and
Parsimony and Human Evolution a critique of the aquatic a hypothesis,

(42:16):
and Langdon talks about this idea of these umbrella hypotheses,
which he says, our quote esthetically appealing because they appear
to be parsimonious, so they're internally consistent. And by offering
this one umbrella hypothesis that explains a range of things,
and they appear to explain a whole lot, as we

(42:38):
were talking about earlier, without making you, without requiring you
to assume a whole lot, but they actually are requiring
you to assume more than they appear to. And so,
in trying to explain why these types of ideas stay
popular with the public, he says, quote one reason for
this is that simple answers, however wrong, are easier to
communicate and are more readily accept up to than the

(43:00):
more sound but more complex solutions. Evolutionary science must wrestle
with this problem, both in its own community and in
the education of the public. I agree, I mean, we
see we see this time and time again. It reminds
me of ongoing discussions regarding climate change, which we've discussed
on on the show, and just sort of the challenges
of science communication in general. Yeah, there are so many

(43:22):
ideas that just because they're simple to communicate and easy
to say and easy to remember, they there's almost like
a survival advantage they have. There's like a selection pressure
against things that are hard to explain, and a multiplication
incentive on ideas that are interesting visually to imagine and

(43:44):
have sort of like the the truthiness feeling, the feeling
of explaining a lot and are easy to communicate, and
I think the aquatic a hypothesis falls in that category. Yeah. Like,
for instance, I come back to what a physicist Brian
Green said about climb it science and the most recent
World Science Festival in New York. He talked about how

(44:05):
he decided, right, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna bone
up on climate science so that I can talk about
it and defend it. And he just he gave up
on it because and this is a this is a
lifetime of work. It's a lifetime of work, and this
is an accomplished physicist saying yeah, I can't. I can't
get up to speed on this in the way that
would be required for me to go to bat for
it against climate change deniers and so forth. So, but

(44:28):
on the same hand, it seems like it would be
it would be far easier for Brian Green, uh, for
you or I as well to bone up on aquatic
ape theory. You know, if someone said, all right, Joe,
you're going on Fox News tomorrow to defend aquatic ape theory,
I could do it. Yeah. I mean I wouldn't want to,
but I could do it. Yeah, it's gotten his favor,

(44:48):
that truthiness gravity. Yeah, all right, And then now we're
gonna take a quick break, and when we come back,
we're going to talk to genetics a little bit. All right,
we're back. Hey. You know, so in the break, I
was just thinking about this. Uh. I wonder if I
have aquatic humanoids, if this, if this works true, would
they have an easier time urinating in the water? Best

(45:11):
off my conversation ever, No, I know what you're talking about,
Like you can kind of when somebody's peeing in the water,
you can, like you were saying, you can see it
on their face. Yeah, there's a look there's a there's
kind of a stillness to the body. I mean in
my own case, like if I'm not in the pool,
but if I'm in the ocean or something, I feel
like I I have a I have to really go
into a certain um you know, state of mind to

(45:33):
pull it off, and I probably look like I'm peeing
in the ocean. Thanks a lot, Robert colluding the ocean
for the rest of us. Well, you know, the fish
do it, themur folk do it, so you know, why
should I have to walk back to the conduct. I
know exactly what you're talking about. There's this kind of
like you see people with like the the kind of
the eyes roll up and they kind of tents up

(45:55):
and grit their teeth a little bit. Yeah, So I
wonder if if this would be something if this would
be in favor of the aquatic ape, like it's something
that we lost that we would have lost upon returning
to land or is it just evidence that we were
never uh some sort of an aquatic commoned species that
was totally at ease peeing in the pool. Okay, let's

(46:17):
get beyond the aquatic ap hypothesis, which imagines this semi
aquatic UH period in human history. As as we've said,
we're not convinced by this idea. It's not absolutely impossible,
but I don't think there's a good reason to go there. However,
if we want to entertain the idea of a totally
aquatic humanoid, a humanoid of the deep, what would we be,

(46:39):
what would we be looking at? What would that entail? Well,
I suppose there are basically two ways to look at it, right,
Either something humanoid evolves independently of humans in the deep,
or a hominid variety splits and involves into a primarily
aquatic species. Okay, so this would be an example of
either convergent evolution where some kind of aquatic species converges

(47:00):
on basically the humanoid form, or it would be a
divergent but basically the same kind of thing we see
in the evolution of whales and dolphins. They were land
dwelling mammals, then they became semi aquatic mammals, and then
they became totally aquatic mammals. Right now, I think the
idea of covergent evolution in the deep. I mean, I

(47:20):
can't think of anything that that lives a primarily aquatic
lifestyle that looks anything like a human being. Sometimes you
get some kind of creepy human behavior convergence with octopi.
That's true. I'm sorry, I said octopi. Octopuses. Yeah, there
there are. There are some some cephalopods that have kind

(47:42):
of a walking technique on on the bottom of the sea.
There are some fish that quote unquote walk on the
bottom of the sea. They move around with their fins.
But that's a far cry from having something that that
really has anything like a human body, like even in
just you know, very broad strokes. You know, we've touched
on a number of the different examples though, of of

(48:05):
of creatures, I've got the other direction mammals that have
returned to the sea, But I think perhaps the manatee
and its skin are our best examples to look to
for you know, for what for what a creature like
this would would be, what an aquatic humanoid would consist of? Right,
And you know, we call them the sirenians for a reason.
It's ironic that these these are creatures that partially inspired

(48:28):
our visions of mermaids. So we're talking about the manatees
here and the doo gong. They're the world's only marine
mammal herbivores, and the only herbivorous mammals ever to have
become totally aquatic. I've never thought about that, the only
marine mammal herbivores. All all the others eat eat the flesh. Yeah,

(48:49):
even if it's very tiny bits of flesh, very tiny creatures,
They're still eating creatures. So Sirenians have existed for more
than fifty million years, having diverged from the pan Galata clade.
The closest living land relatives to these Iranians are the
elephants and the high axes. Now a, this is a

(49:10):
pretty interesting In two thousand and sixteen study by Maria
Hikina and Nathan Clark looked to three major independent evolutionary
events in which mammals returned to the sea and what
sort of evolutionary tradeoffs took place. So they used a
fifty nine placental mammal genomes to calculate the relative rates

(49:32):
of evolution for all branches in eighteen thousand and forty
nine gene trees. They calculated a genome wide average rate
of evolution across all species. Basically, they wanted to see
if these uh oceanic returns entailed and evolutionary acceleration or deceleration.
That's interesting. So they identified three main themes, a burst

(49:54):
of adaptation, then relaxation, and additional constraint. They identical fied
marine accelerated genes to the tune of about nine percent,
and they related to these different features new functions for
genes forming skin and connective tissue, sensory systems, muscle function,

(50:15):
skin and connective tissue, lung function. So an example here
would be accelerated adaptation for a gene encoding a lung
uh surfactant protein that may have been necessary for diving,
and then lipid metabolism. But they also identified marine deceller
accelerated genes even more than the you know, the accelerated,

(50:36):
and these related to a general loss of the number
of sensory genes for smell and taste. No, no more
taste once we get in the water. Yeah, I mean,
it's it seems to be the case that that aquatic
mammals have have a much decreased sense of taste. So
I guess once you're a sperm whale and you're like
trying to eat giant squids, you just don't want to

(50:57):
be tasting that well uh thing like that. Now, other
marine decelerated genes included molecular molecular maintenance strategies such as
DNA repair, chromosomal maintenance, immune response, and program cell death.
So all of this, they said, meshes with the increased
constraint on somatic cell maintenance for such creatures. And I

(51:18):
have a quote from the paper here. Quote hundreds of
genes accelerated their evolutionary rates in all three marine mammal
lineages during their transition to aquatic life. These marine accelerated
genes are highly enriched for pathways. The control recognized functional
adaptations in marine mammals, including muscles, physiology, lipid metabolism, sensory systems,

(51:40):
and skin and connective tissue. The accelerations resulted from both
adaptive evolution as seen in skin and lung genes, and
loss of function as in gustatory and olfactory genes. In
regard to sensory systems, this finding provides further evidence that
reduced senses of taste and smell are ubiquitous in marine
mammal So naturally, this is not a blueprint for evolved

(52:04):
aquatic humanoids, but I think it does give give us
some sort of idea of the genetic changes that might
take place over millions of years until we reach the
point that we're Kevin Costner from from water World. Yeah,
but but how do we reach the point that we're
Dennis Hopper in water World? Well, all I can say
is that Kevin Costner's character would probably not have a

(52:24):
good sense of taste based on this research. It's a
bummer man. Yeah, all right, So let's come back to
the reverse though, something from the deep evolving to life
on the surface. This is of course the story of
all terrestrial life, dating back to the terrestrial land invasion
of the Devonian era. But when we try and think
of a humanoid creature evolving under the water, it gets
a little sticky. We get into the creature from the

(52:47):
Black Lagoon territory, we get into u Z or Bloodwaters
of dr C territory. Because in these cases, uh they
often will bring up certain fish that can walk on
land as examples of how this might work, or a
fish that can breathe both above and below the water.

(53:07):
And we do have ambulatory fish walking fish such as
the mud skipper. We have the the hand fish and
frog fish, which quote unquote walk on the seafloor with
specialized fins. And of course there are the there's the
walking catfish of Southeast Asia, which we should be clear
does not so much as walk as it flops and
flips and wriggles around. And uh, the lungfish, the fish

(53:30):
highlighted in the creature movies. Uh, this creature does boast
a lung and gil combo existing as a sort of
call back to the three seventy five million year old
evolution of land oil and creatures from a long extic
species of lobe fin fish. But it still doesn't give
us quite the recipe for a gill man that we
would we would like. Yeah, there are a lot of

(53:51):
problems I can see here for a humanoid evolving in
the water itself. I mean bipedality whatever you want to
think about it, Like, even if you're still attracted to
the aquatic a hypothesis, um, which I don't necessarily think
you should be, But even if you're attracted to that,
it says bipedality was sort of a transitionary feature, right,

(54:14):
It was a product of wading in maybe deep water,
but not totally deep water, not like water deeper than
you could stand in, and so having like a bipedality
and legs is not really useful. If you are a
fully aquatic creature, you would eventually lose them. It would
be much better to have fins, right, Well, I get

(54:36):
The only case I can see to be made here
is that the creature from the Black Lagoon must come
out of the lagoon to acquire prey and of course women.
But but you know it it is It is not
an obligate um marine creature. It is a creature that
that that must come out of the water to prey,

(54:56):
a creature that is perhaps in the process of becoming
a land creature. So yeah, almost anything you could think
of as a humanoid in shape at all would really
need to be semi aquatic, right. It would need to
be at least or mostly aquatic. It would need to
have some reason to come out of the water if
it was going to have legs like human legs, because

(55:19):
legs are made for for fighting gravity. Legs are not
made for swimming around in a you know, in a
buoyancy situation. That's true. And if you don't have a
switch to magically turn your fins in defeat, then you're
probably out of luck. Yeah, So I think if there
were an aquatic humanoid. It would more likely be a
mermaid with a fish butt than a humanoid like the

(55:41):
gill man with legs. I think so. I think that
makes the most sense. In fact, since they spend most
of their time under the water, even if they did
come out of the water water, I'd guess is that
to be a mermaid with a fish butt that would
crawl around with its upper arms. Yeah, yeah, we do
see that model sometimes the what is it happened in
the Woods movie? Oh? I had a had a mirman

(56:03):
creature that comes comes crawling across the floor after it's victims.
Here's another question, though, how do you think if there
were such a thing as an aquatic humanoid, how would
tool use evolve differently at the bottom of the ocean. Oh? Yeah,
that brings us back to some some discussions we've had

(56:23):
in the past, particularly as it pertains to the use
of fire technology and the idea of any technology existing
without fire. Um, I mean I keep coming back to.
I guess it would a lot of it would have
to be sort of biologically based, you know, I mean
it would it could not be fire based because you
you cannot really have fire under water. I mean, you

(56:44):
see some things that get kind of classified as rudimentary
tool use by by like octopuses right where they I mean,
maybe this isn't tool use, but the idea of like
pulling a rock over the entrance of their dwellings, they
can cover it up and protect them selves. That that's
interesting behavior. Yeah, I mean that's the use of I
believe the distinction is that's a nature fact. That is

(57:06):
taking something in nature and using it for a purpose. Now,
and then you could say, well, I can imagine an
underwater humanoid making an artifact, taking something and sharpening it
into a skewer or shaping it to better protect them,
so that that level of technology I could I could see.
I mean one thing though, is that under the water,

(57:27):
both the resistance density of the water and the buoyancy
effects all would kind of mitigate against some of the
benefits you get from say stone tools are our most
basic tools are very often things that are designed to
maximize kinetic energy delivery. Right, So it would be something
that you could throw really hard and hit something and

(57:49):
kill it, or something that you could hit another thing
with and break it, and kind of a gravity assisted
swinging motion, all of which is a little bit harder
to do underwater because you can't swing as fast underwater
to the resistance of the water. I mean, I don't know.
I wonder if you could have a tool using creature
evolve under the water. Well, more than more than likely

(58:10):
you have to depend upon them originally being an alien
species crash landed in the water. Um. Yeah, this is
reminding me a lot of the the old nautical maps
which were on which you had mermaids and sea monsters,
but also all of these different hybrids. Sea lion, a
sea lion that is not like our sea lion, but
an actual lion with a fish uh portion to its body.

(58:32):
And a lot of this was based on the idea
that the ocean contains a parallel version of everything that
we have on the surface and it and you can
extrapolate that to include not only the animals, but the resources,
and say so you end up falling in the trap
of thinking, well, the underwater creatures they would have their
own minerals somehow, they would somehow, you know, smelt them

(58:53):
and and craft them into weapons. Without really thinking about it.
That the the the aquatic world is is it's a
part of our world, but is a very different, very
alien environment compared to the surface. Yeah, it's not exactly
the mirror world. It's more through a glass darkly. Yeah.
All right, So there you have it. In these two episodes,
I hope we've we've given everybody a lot of fresh

(59:15):
perspective to consider not only the evolution of humans maybe,
but but also just o our myths and our fictions
regarding underwater people and underwater hybrids. And of course we
want to hear back from everybody concerning their favorite uh
underwater humanoids in myth in uh, in literature and cinema.

(59:36):
What's your favorite nine Underwater Peril movie? Totally? I know
we've got some deep Star six partisans out there. I
think people get attacked. What is it a killer clam
or something in that movie? Uh, it's I haven't rewatched
it yet, um, but it's some sort of an underwater critter.
Yeah yeah um. And also Mermaid movies. What's your favorite
did you like? Did you grow up like me watching

(59:57):
Splash on VHS? Over into over akend? I didn't know
that about you. It's a solid mermaid romantic comedy. Okay,
I'll have to check it out. Yeah, yeah, Tom Hanks,
Darryl Hannah, John Candy tremendous. Did they ever do a
Jetson's Meet the Flintstones kind of thing with Leviathan and
Splash Leviathan? Oh you mean, did Leviathan Meet Splash movie?

(01:00:21):
I don't think it exists, or at least not yet.
Movie executives, high powered industry players out there, if you're listening,
take note. Yes, opportunity knocks all right. Hey. In the meantime,
check out stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That
is where you will find all of our podcast episodes.
You'll find that, blog posts and other material as well.
Links out to our social media accounts will be found

(01:00:43):
on that page. Also, we're talking about Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram,
We're on all those things. Follow us where you will.
Thanks as always to our excellent audio producers Alex Williams
and Torry Harrison. And if you want to get in
touch with us directly to let us know feedback about
this episode or any other let us know topics you
might want us to cover in the future. Uh to

(01:01:05):
ramble on and on about nine underwater movies. You can
email us at blow the Mind at how stuff works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics,
does it, how stuff works, dot com bo