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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuffworks
dot com. Hey, welcome 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

(00:27):
aquatic counterparts, the humanoid types who live in the depths
and there. This is a trope all throughout fiction. You
find it in u in all 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 Leviathans. Oh. Yes, one of
the one of the several nineteen eighty nine underwater Peril

(00:50):
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 Part one or not.
We've talked about it so much recently I can't even
recall when it happened. But anyway, Yeah, so nine you
had James Cameron's The Abyss, but you also had Deep
Star six Leviathan, Lords of the deep for some reason,

(01:12):
everybody went nuts making underwater sci fi movies. Yeah, we've been,
so I'm just trying to piece together in a casual
way why that was, you know what what was happening
in the world. Was it I did have to do
with the 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 preyests to converge upon it. Now,

(01:35):
Leviathan is a I think you'll back me up here,
a terrible movie, but a great terrible movie. It is. Ah,
it is a thoroughly enjoyable, flawed film. It's the that's
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.

(01:56):
The DVD I had of it it actually said, is
alien underwater? That's the whole quote. Yeah, it is highly derivative,
but it 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 the overall
sets that are used, especially the interior sets for this

(02:18):
underwater station, are tremendous. Like the set does as much
as the cast does, really to create a sense of
backstory 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 sleez and obnoxiousness. Yeah, he plays this sleazy character

(02:38):
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
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 gonna talk about today. So today
we wanted to address some of the biological ideas about

(03:02):
aquatic humanoids. And so one of the things in Leviathan
is you spoiler alert for this nineteen eighty nine B movie.
You find out that the Russians in the movie, you're
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

(03:22):
an ichno centaur, 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
this giant monster that's basically got a catfish head and
then it's got Daniel Stearn's face sticking out of its
back and some other random tentacles and Lamprey's poking off

(03:43):
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 such a
creature exist and what would it look like biologically? And
if the quatic humanoids could exist in reality, how would

(04:06):
they figure into our our picture of human evolution. Yeah,
it's it's a fascinating question, of course that you know.
The the easy answer is, of course, yes, all life
came from the sea, and we have plenty of cases
of terrestrial life returning to the sea. So we're not
talking about just complete whackadoodle ideas about about life emerging

(04:27):
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 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

(04:49):
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 aquatic
ape hypothesis. Yes, and and of course that instantly summons
the images of a guerrilla mermaid. I will not, I

(05:11):
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, not like not like mermaid
top with guerrilla legs. No no, no fish fish on
the bottom, uh, silverback grilla on the top. That's the
only way to put it together, Marilla. Yeah, not exactly,

(05:35):
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 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

(05:58):
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 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

(06:18):
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 hominids or the family Homonide.
This includes orangutans, guerrillas, chimpanzees, and binobos, and genetically we
are extremely similar to these animals, especially to chimpanzees and

(06:41):
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. We're very, very close to these animals.
But there are a few key differences, and some of
the most major of these key differences are that we
are mostly hair us bipeds were naked, smooth skinned, and

(07:03):
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
only the human branch of this family to drive our
ancestors to become relatively smooth and bipedal while the rest

(07:26):
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 humans? That question
is obviously nonsense, because we didn't get from chimpanzees to humans.
Both chimpanzees and humans came from something that lived more
than four million years ago. Chimpanzees are our cousins, not

(07:48):
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 and
New Scientists arguing for a pretty startling answer to this.
Hardy said, in the distant past, our ancestors distinguished themselves

(08:11):
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 return to land exactly, and that that
shaped the differences between humans today and the other great apes.
And so in this article, Hardy summarized his hypothesis about

(08:32):
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
life in the trees to feed on the seashores and
to hunt for food shellfish, sea urchins, etcetera, in the

(08:53):
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, 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

(09:17):
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
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

(09:39):
shallow seas, and breaking open sea urchins, and then with
increasing skill, capturing fish with his hands. And of course
this match is of the what we know about human
cultures 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

(10:00):
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 beachkus,
that we live adjacent to the water and spent a
whole lot of time in it. Homo biwa chicas like it. Now,

(10:22):
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 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

(10:44):
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 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
pachactas and into high us to like this more otter

(11:08):
like existence of this creature called ambulositis, and then eventually
two creatures like the Dora down which start to look
sort of like modern 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

(11:32):
or musta Lloyd's meaning things like skunks, raccoons, or weasels.
So evolution of land dwelling 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 a hypothesis. The problems come in later because

(11:54):
what's the real question, did it specifically happen to our ancestors? Right?
Because if it, 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,

(12:17):
the British marine biologist Alastair Hardy in nineteen sixty but
it was really most popularized by a Welsh author named
Elaine Morgan 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 Morgan's argument for the aquatic

(12:37):
ape 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 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

(12:58):
theory some more than thank alright, we're back, alright. So
Morgan's talk has a lot of framing material in it
where she sort of lays the context for her argument
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

(13:20):
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,
if you know what I mean, it's often the opening
argument of somebody who's about to lay some some some
really fringe theory on you. Right, So, it is true

(13:42):
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 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

(14:03):
look for other mammals without body hair like us, they're
almost all, she says, water dwelling creatures, the dugong, the walrus, dolphins, whales,
the hippopotamus, the manateee. Yeah. The only other example that
comes to mind is, of course, the naked mole rat um,
which is also kind of a special case given in
it's a subterranean rodent that lives with a with a

(14:27):
hive like structure. Yeah, she mentions it actually, uh, And
then she says, wait a minute, wait a minute, what
about the elephant. That's a land dwelling mammal without much
body hair? Well, Morgan says, it turns out 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

(14:49):
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 a very close
ancient relative of elephants. She says, there's a strong correlation
between nakedness and water. There's some hairy or furry mammals
that do live in the water, right, You can think

(15:10):
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 does spend
a lot of time in the water and is an
adept swimmer. Yeah, but there, She says. There are almost
no hairless or smooth mammals that do not either live

(15:31):
in the water or have fairly recent ancestors that lived
in the water, and she claims that the only exception,
as we mentioned, is the naked Somalian mole rat, which
she says, quote never puts its nose 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,

(15:54):
all the things rear up at the time. You know,
at times a cat will rear up on two legs
and look exceedingly creepy, but that's at leg the rest
of the time. Now that's mammals. Of course, once you
start looking into birds and dinosaurs, of course you get
basically humanoids by this characteristic. But the some four legged animals,
of course, as we say, can occasionally stand up on

(16:15):
two legs. When do our closest ape relatives walk on
two legs? Well, Morgan claims there's only one circumstance when
they always walk on two legs, and it's when they're
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

(16:39):
running underneath our skin and other great apes don't have this.
They're fat is stored more internally around their kidneys and
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 guerrilla and they're

(17:01):
just completely jacked, just conceedingly ripped in ways. It's like
hilarious muscles, comic book cover muscles. Yeah, that it is
a comic book 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,

(17:21):
Oh yeah, I mean that's 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 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 lines a lot blurrier

(17:41):
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 how come we can talk
and other hominids can't. Well, Morgan claims that the difference
between a human and a gorilla is not in the
speech producing organs of the throat and the lungs, but

(18:03):
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 unconscious nervous system while
others are conscious and others can be toggled on and

(18:24):
off between conscious and unconscious control. Like you can't consciously
toggle on and off your digestion or your heartbeat or
your metabolism. But even though most of the time your
breathing is unconscious and automatic, you can take it over
with your executive control and consciously toggle your breath on

(18:44):
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 just shut it down and to
drown themselves. Wow. Well, I mean that would be an

(19:07):
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, 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

(19:29):
go along with her on this being an exclusively human
and aquatic mammal trait 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 they're not semi aquatic mammals. Yeah,
I would agree with that. Okay, Another thing, she says,

(19:50):
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 ape where we can
dive smoothly into the water. She says, quote, try to
imagine a guerrilla diving into water. I think I've seen
it done in a cartoon, but that's about it. Well,

(20:12):
they it's like a cannonball, right, they 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,
but I don't think it's like the ancient aliens hypothesis

(20:34):
or something. I think it is an extraneous 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, I would agree it
is certainly not ancient aliens. But there are some some issues,

(20:56):
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 and this

(21:17):
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 it's all inference

(21:39):
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 in speculation. So you just
try to find the best most plausible inference and speculation
to form your eye ideas around. But we have to

(22:02):
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 aphypothesis 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 of

(22:24):
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 desk at work.

(22:46):
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. Noe,
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 of those coworkers. Right, So, yeah,

(23:08):
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 coworkers took a
bite out of the sandwich, or you could hypothesize that
a polar bear snuck into your office undetected, and this

(23:33):
was a polar bear that had undergone a surgical body
modification 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
explanation is is much further removed from reality and requires

(23:53):
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 basically like any investigation, right, Like,

(24:14):
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, And like the further away
you get from the sandwich from your office, they the

(24:38):
moral 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

(25:01):
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

(25:22):
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 big 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. Yeah,

(25:43):
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 meant and about
some types of assumptions appearing parsimonious, but actually requiring a

(26:05):
lot 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 returned to land, forsaking their aquatic homeland,

(26:27):
the same 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

(26:49):
the Savannah 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 woodlands
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

(27:09):
make the argument that all right, the aquatic humanoids move
out of the water, but they're still living close enough
to the water. They're 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 of natural selection would drive those away. Yeah.

(27:33):
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 that's not true anymore. What what generally is

(27:55):
believed is that we became basically Homo sapiens in a
woodland environment and in something 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 that's true, though, we eventually moved back

(28:17):
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 ape theory explains all of
these features, but it explains them all twice. Every one

(28:42):
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 what we are with this aquatic explanation,
and it becomes more about shoehorn earning the aquatic period
into our evolutionary history. Another thing I think we should

(29:04):
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 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

(29:27):
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 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

(29:48):
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 a start stark, as
Morgan suggests. Now, she does to be fair acknowledge otters
and stuff like that, but there are also so many

(30:08):
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 green fur. Semi aquatic cats,
semi aquatic her pestids like the crab eating mongoose. You've

(30:29):
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 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,

(30:53):
the head of the evolutionary biology group at the University
of Reading in England and the editor of the Encyclopedia
of Evil Ouan, explained some recent thinking. One of the
most common ideas about why humans lost 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

(31:15):
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 savannah, we might
need to lose the hair or if our survival niche
became more oriented around intense, prolonged exercise, such as the

(31:38):
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 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 i'mate social bonding is based around grooming,

(32:03):
sitting around and picking stuff out of other people's hair. Yeah,
and I mean you think of the constant thread of lice.
I mean, my child is in an elementary school, so
that the threat of that the head life 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

(32:25):
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. So Pagel and a colleague
named Walter Bodmer 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

(32:49):
we all know, you know, ticks and lice and biting
flies all they all make this happy home in thick
body hair. They love it. And these ecto parasites 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

(33:11):
on ticks if you want some more information there. 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

(33:32):
as a refuge for these disease spreading parasites. So once
you can build fires, and once you can wear 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

(33:53):
vulnerability hanging around. Yeah, Like when we were talking about
aquatic apes supposedly returning to the land, like, I instantly thought, well,
when I get out of a shower, I grab a towel.
So perhaps you know, the naked ape emerges, it murders,
a hairy animal of some of some form, puts on
its fur. Like. It's one thing to think of that,

(34:14):
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 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 seemed to support the theory.

(34:36):
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 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

(34:59):
loss in humans, can also select for body hair loss
in naked mole rats. And then there's a totally different
kind of answer sexual selection. Sexual 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

(35:21):
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 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

(35:42):
have a hairless, shirtless 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 desirable mate, I'm in good shape. Here's the question.
I actually don't know the answer to this, is there
a reason I can't think of Harry body Builders? Is that, like,
is there a biological reason that like super muscle e

(36:05):
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, better off the muscles.
I mean, there are plenty of muscular, hairy dudes. I mean,
you can can do a search on that and you
will get some answers. But but yeah, my understanding is
that it's a it's about waxing of the body hair

(36:26):
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. Oh yeah, yeah, you
those guys are waxing in shave and 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

(36:48):
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 you have to go to
now to address another plank. 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

(37:10):
you know, we were in a more woodland type environment
when we when we evolved bipedality. But anyway, what made
us stand upright 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.

(37:31):
But there are other ideas like perhaps bipedalism emerged from
a gathering lifestyle where our ancestors began to walk on
two legs so 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,

(37:53):
going back to Morgan's argument about bipedality, she says, you know,
wind to our closest tape, relatives walk on two legs.
She said, as 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,

(38:15):
I was like, well, let's let's see. I bet there's
video of gorillas waiting through water on the internet. I
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,

(38:35):
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
use your hands to feel for things. And granted, primates
don't have exactly the same hand foot scenario is as 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

(38:58):
and so definitely li guerrillas will walk on four legs
in the water. I've seen it. But I guess we
have 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 ap 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

(39:20):
not parsimonious, there's no reason to resort to it. Why
is it 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 not really taken seriously by experts in
the field. So why is it so captivating in the

(39:42):
public imagination. Well, I think part of the answer is
our entire first episode, where we talked about our mythological
and fictional obsession with the idea of of humans that
live in the water, a 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 a theory sometimes. I mean even even in cases

(40:04):
when it's you know, it's not somebody saying, hey, I
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

(40:25):
those things that's just so interesting to the mind. It's
so fun to picture and so fun to entertain that
it's sort of like overrides our sense of disinterest in
other 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

(40:48):
Parsimony and Human Evolution a critique of the aquatic a hypothesis,
and Langdon talks about this idea of these umbrella hypotheses,
which he says, our quote aesthetically a peeling because they
appear to be parsimonious, so they're internally consistent, and by
offering this one umbrella hypothesis that explains a range of things,

(41:11):
and they appear to explain a whole lot, as we
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

(41:33):
communicate and are more readily accepted than the 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, and it reminds me of
ongoing discussions regarding climate change, which we've discussed on the

(41:54):
on the show, and just sort of the challenges of
science communication in general. Yeah, there are so many 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

(42:16):
on ideas that are interesting visually to imagine and 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 climate science and the most recent World

(42:39):
Science Festival in New York. He talked about how 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

(43:02):
deniers and so forth. So but 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.

(43:23):
It's gotten his favor, that truthiness gravity. Yeah, all right
on that. Now we're gonna take a quick break and
when we come back, we're gonna 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 words true, would they have an easier time urinating

(43:46):
in the water. Best off 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

(44:07):
really go into a certain um, you know, state of
mind to pull it off, and I'd 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, the mr 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, uh, you see people with like

(44:28):
the the kind of the eyes roll up and they
kind of tents up 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 we would have lost upon
returning to land. Or is it just evidence that we
were never uh, some sort of an aquatic committed species

(44:48):
that was totally at ease peeing in the pool. Okay,
let's get beyond the aquatic ap hypothesis, which imagines this
semi aquatic uh period in 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

(45:10):
idea of a totally aquatic humanoid, a humanoid of the deep,
what would we be, 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 evolves into a primarily aquatic species. Okay,
so this would be an example of either convergent evolution

(45:33):
where some kind of aquatic species converges 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

(45:54):
evolution in the deep. I mean, I can't think of
anything that that lives is 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

(46:16):
there are some some cephalopods that have kind 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

(46:36):
you know, very broad strokes. You know, we've touched on
a number of the different examples though, of of of
creatures that have 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 what an aquatic humanoid would

(46:57):
consist of? Right? And you know, we called them the
Sirenians for a reason. It's ironic that these these are
creatures that partially inspired our visions of mermaids. So we're
talking about the manates here and the doo gong. Uh.
They're the world's only marine mammal herbivores, and the only
her herbivorous mammals ever to have become totally aquatic. I've

(47:18):
never thought about that, the only marine mammal herbivores, while
all the others eat eat the flesh. Yeah, 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 Panugu lata clade.
The closest living land relatives to the Sirenians are the

(47:43):
elephants and the high axes. Now a, this is a
pretty interesting In two thousand and sixteen, studied by Maria
Hikina and Nathan Clark looked at three major independent evolutionary
events in which mammals returned to the sea and what
sort of evl utionary tradeoffs took place. So they used
a fifty nine placental mammal genomes to calculate the relative

(48:08):
rates 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

(48:30):
a burst of adaptation, then relaxation, and additional constraint. They
identified 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,

(48:51):
skin and connective tissue lung function. So an example here
would be accelerated adaptation for a gene encoding a lung
surfactant protein that may have been necessary for diving, and
then lipid metabolism. But they also identified marine decellered accelerated
genes even more than the you know, the accelerated and

(49:12):
these related to a general loss of the number of
sensory genes for smell and taste. No, no more taste
once we got 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 be

(49:34):
tasting that well, uh, something like that. Now. Other marine
decelerated genes included molecular molecular maintenance strategies such as DNA repair,
chromosometal 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 have a

(49:55):
quote from the paper here, quote hundreds of genes accelerated
their evolute sctionary 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 muscle physiology, lipid metabolism, sensory systems,

(50:16):
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 mammals.

(50:38):
So naturally, this is not a blueprint for evolved 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 reached the point that
we're Kevin Costner from from water World. But but how
do we reach the point that we're Dennis Hopper in
water World? Well, all I can say is that Kevin

(50:59):
Costner's character or would probably not have a 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

(51:19):
evolving under the water, it gets a little sticky. We
get into the creature from the Black Lagoon territory, we
get into uh Z or Bloodwaters of dr Z territory.
Because in these cases uh they often will bring up
certain fish that can walk on land as examples of
of how this might work, or fish that can breathe

(51:41):
both above and below the water. And we do have
ambulatory fish walking fish such as the mud skipper. We
have that the hand fish and frog fish, which quote
unquote walk on the seafloor with specialized fins, and of
course they're 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

(52:05):
uh the lungfish, the fish highlighted in the creature movies.
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 landwell and creatures from
a long extrict species of lobe thin fish. But it
still doesn't give us quite the recipe for a gill
man that we would we would like. Yeah, there are

(52:27):
a lot of 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

(52:49):
transitionary feature, right, 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.

(53:09):
It would be much better to have fins, right, Well,
I get 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

(53:32):
water to prey, 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

(53:53):
human legs, because 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

(54:14):
be a mermaid with a fish butt than a humanoid
like the 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, what I guess
is that would be a mermaid with a fish butt
that would crawl around with its upper arms. Yeah, and
we do see that model sometimes the what is it

(54:36):
the Cabin in the Woods movie? Oh yeah, I had
a had a Merman creature that comes comes crawling across
the floor after its 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

(54:58):
back to some some discussions with out 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 you could would
it would it could not be fire based because you

(55:18):
you cannot really have fire under water. I mean, you
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 themselves. That that's interesting behavior. Yeah,

(55:39):
I mean that's the use of I believe the distinction
is that's a nature fact, that is taking something in
nature and using it for 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 see. I mean one

(56:01):
thing though, is that under the water, 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,

(56:21):
So it would be something that you could throw really
hard and hit something and 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 do the resistance of the water.
I mean, I don't know. I wonder if you could

(56:42):
have a tool using creature evolve under the water. Well,
more than more than likely 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,

(57:03):
a sea lion that is not like our sea lion,
but an actual lion with a fish uh portion to
its body. 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

(57:23):
into the trap of thinking, well, the underwater creatures they
would have their own minerals somehow, they would somehow, you know,
smelt them and and craft them into weapons. Without really
thinking about it. That the the the aquatic world 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

(57:46):
all right. So there you have it. Uh. In these
two episodes, I hope we've we've given everybody a lot
of fresh perspective to consider not only the evolution of
humans maybe, but but also just our our myths, our
fictions regarding underwater people and underwater hybrids. And of course,
we want to hear back from everybody concerning their favorite

(58:07):
uh underwater humanoids in myth in UH in literature and cinema.
What's your favorite nine Underwater Peril movie? Totally? I know
we've got some deep Star six partisans out there. Yeah,
I think people get attacked. What is it a killer
clam or something in that movie? It's I haven't rewatched
it yet, um, but it's some sort of an underwater

(58:27):
critter yeah. Um. Oh. And also Mermaid movies? What's your
favorite did you like? Did you grow up like me
watching Splash on VHS over and over again? I didn't
know that about you, Rob. Yeah, 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

(58:49):
Leviathan and Splash with Leviathan? Oh? You mean did Leviathan
meat Splash movie? 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

(59:10):
dot com. That is where you will find all of
our podcast episodes. You'll find blog posts and other material
as well. Links out to our social media accounts will
be found on that page. Also, so we're talking about Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram,
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