Ermergerd. There’s such a thing as “hydrofeminism.” Who knew??
Well not a “thing” so much, but a word, with at least one person using it as a word and saying words about it.
The mind reels. Mermaids? Transmermaids? Bints in ponds? Synchronized swimmers?
Hydrowhatnow?
Among those who are cognisant of our watery links to the wider world we find the small Copenhagen publishing house and curatorial platform Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology. The five curators behind the laboratory see water as âtransnational, trans-species and trans-corporealâ.
The laboratory has just published a Danish translation of Astrida Neimaniâs text âHydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Waterâ while also launching the exhibition project Hydra, which will unfold over the course of the spring at the edge of the water at Snekkersten north of Copenhagen. The group members themselves describe the project as an âexploration of watery worldings, trans-corporeal trauma and oceanic healingâ.
Let’s learn more:
The meeting focuses on writings by Astrida Neimanis on Hydrofeminism. Water is the element that, more than any other, ties human beings in to the world around them â from the oceans that surround us to the water that makes up most of our bodies. Exploring the cultural and philosophical implications of this fact, Hydrofeminism develops an innovative new mode of posthuman feminist phenomenology that understands our bodies as being fundamentally part of the natural world and not separate from or privileged to it.
Where does the feminism come in?
Building on the works by Luce Irigaray, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze, Hydrofeminism brings a new feminist perspective to bear on ideas of embodiment and ecological ethics in the post-human critical moment. Neimanis writes: âWatershed pollution, a theory of embodiment, amniotic becomings, disaster, environmental colonialism, how to write, global capital, nutrition, philosophy, birth, rain, animal ethics, evolutionary biology, death, storytelling, bottled water, multinational pharmaceutical corporations, drowning, poetry. These are all feminist questions and they are mostly inextricable from one another.â
How to write, global capitalism, storytelling, multinational pharmaceutical corporations – WHAT DO THEY HAVE TO DO WITH WATER? Apart from the obvious “well you can’t have any of them without water because humans can’t live without water” – which is surely a little too broad and obvious to be meaningful.
I can list things too. Potatoes, shoes, Calvinism, ballet, hair, the stock market, fleas, the Daily Mail, smallpox, Denali, tamanduas. DO YOU SEE HOW CONNECTED IT ALL IS?
Comments
58 responses to “De profundis”
‘These are all feminist questions’ These are not questions, they are a list of words. Honestly, my staff do this too, they’ll write things like ‘the requirements are’ or ‘the issues to be dealt with are’ followed by a random list of words. I have to go and ask them to actually write down the requirements or issues, as the rest of us can’t intuit their meaning from single words.
I swear I first read the last word in “posthuman feminist phenomenology” as “phrenology.”
Hydrofeminism: Something to do with this?
https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_magic_washing_machine
Or maybe more generally how hydroelectricity reduced the drudgery of work usually dumped on women.
It must be great to be her graduate student. All you need to do to write a dissertation is pick two or three of the items in the list and write a few hundred pages of dense, uninterpretable prose connecting them. “Images of drowning and bottled water in 18th Century Flemish poetry: A post-human hydrofeminist critique”.
(But what is the “post-human critical moment”?)
“Water is the element that, more than any other, ties human beings in to the world around them â from the oceans that surround us to the water that makes up most of our bodies” you say? Now what could be deeper than a Deepity? I’ve got it — a Derpity. There, I can make up words too!
[Oh, I see I’m not the first.
O gawd. Canât I just reread Anne Morrow Lindberghâs Gift From the Sea?
I have it easy, I can just walk into Puget Sound.
And this is innovative and new how? Ecology has seen humans – our bodies, ourselves, if you will – as fundamentally part of the natural world for a long time. My students come into class thinking we are above and separate from nature, and usually leave understanding that we are natural, we are organic beings, we are part of the world, not separate from it. We don’t call it “hydrofeminism”. We call it “ecology”.
Great. Now she’s going to sue me for plagiarism after my book comes out where one of my witch characters turns herself into water to escape from someone who is holding her against her will. Oh, well, I hereby announce that this is the first…the very first…time I have heard of this, and my date stamp on my computer will verify that I wrote that book before today. Right?
All that being what it is, I must say this is one of the big problems with having a degree in Environmental Science. People assail me with this nonsense all the time, my students expect me to promote it, and when I say woo things are balderdash, I am dismissed as knowing nothing about the field. Sigh.
I suppose I could walk into the Platte River, but it only comes up to about my knees most of the time. I suppose I will have to lie down to become one with it.
Water is not an element.
I can just picture it â you with your fantastic garlands of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples falling into the weeping water, your clothes spread wide to bear you up, and you chanting snatches of old lauds.
Too much water hast thou, poor Ophelia.
Oh, come on. Earth: Air: Fire: Water. It’s right there, y’see. That’s all there is. Those falsehoods on the Table of the Elements are white colonial social constructs, and likely transphobic to boot.
Hahaha I walked right into that one, didn’t I. Too much walking into today.
My parents managed to teach me all about the interconnectedness of all living entities through our mutual hydrological requirements in just four words, when I was a tot.
“Everything needs water to live.”
That whole thing reads like pretentious twaddle to make students think that they are learning something profound and meaningful.
Water is the element that, more than any other, ties human beings in to the world around them â from the oceans that surround us to the water that makes up most of our bodies
This sounds like the start of a rant about fluoridation, doesnât it?
As for water being an âelementâ, the phrase works in that âa substance that cannot be separated into simpler substances by chemical processesâ is not the only definition we could use for the word âelementâ – and itâs likely that the writer is not writing or thinking about chemistry here. But being someone who teaches chemistry for a living, Iâve got to admit that the phrase makes me grind my teeth just a bit.
Damn, the thread filled up between composing that comment and actually sending it (I got interrupted by a conversation with one of my sons) and is now rather redundant.
Rather like that course, by the sounds of it.
Yes! I very nearly quoted General Jack D. Ripper on the subject.
Sounds like one of those filmstrips running on loop at an exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry.
Oh, Sastra. Please accept this elegant thimble.
Sophie Lewis’s ponderings brought to mind two things: Elaine Morgan’s Aquatic Ape hypothesis was one.
Less endearingly wacky was Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies, about the subculture of the Freikorps. Theweleit discusses the Freikorps’ fearful association of “woman” with “water”–formless, dangerous, boundary-dissolving water–at some length.
Lady M, I just read Elaine Morgan last summer, and while she spins a good yarn, I was sitting there going WTF through the whole thing. Yeah, that’s what came to my mind when I was reading the post, too.
So does ordinary non-pomo science. This is Goop-style feminist nonsense, ‘it’s feminine to be into psuedoscience rather than actual science. The hard science are too masculine!’ sort of thing.
Coiin Day @# 10:
How confined and self-stifling can one be?
Water can be anything it chooses to be. Not only cold like ice, hot like steam or a sloshy liquid in between. It can be soft as lemonade, hard as neat whisky, fluffy as powder snow or otherwise. Just ask the Captain of the Titanic.
Like any person, except a TERF of course, it can be anything it likes: salty, peppery, elemental, compoundal, mixtural, metallic, non-metallic, organic, inorganic, wild, still, deep, shallow; in fact just about any word in the dictionary.
Hope that helps.
Lady M and iknklast::#19, #20:
Aquatic Ape theory has enough going for it to win endorsement from David Attenborough, who is nobodyâs fool IMHO. If I was being chased by a big cat, I would not try to climb a tree for refuge. I would grab my spear, club or whatever and head for the nearest water, where I would face my feline adversary on far more equal terms.
As The Bard said: âThere are more things between Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of by conventional thinkers. â At least, I think thatâs what he said.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquatic_ape_hypothesis
(emphasis mine)
I assume they skipped the maths. :-))
Omar #23–
If that big cat is a tiger, you might need a different strategy. :)
https://youtu.be/TudV4gfBSN0
@Omar That won’t help if you’re being chased by a tiger – they love the water and can swim well.
Omar, I stand by my analysis. Aquatic Ape is interesting, but Elaine Morgan got many, if not most, of her facts wrong, and the idea has been debunked by evolutionary scientists. I do not believe David Attenborough is a fool; neither do I believe he knows everything. I will alter my opinion should the evidence point me in that direction, but at this point, the aquatic ape theory is pretty well dismissed by science. And I don’t get my science from Wikipedia.
Lady M & Claire:
Ah yes. I did not say it would be a pushover. But I would rate my chances higher if I was in water and standing bipedally on the bottom against a tiger forced to swim or float. Particularly if I had a club, spear, or even just a heavy stick.
Early Australian settlers before the land was fenced, reported that when chased by a pack of dogs, a kangaroo would head for water, get in as deep as it could, and then with the advantage of being able to stand on the bottom where they could only swim, push each dog as it swam within reach under; till it drowned. No guarantees, but it increased its chance of its own survival. (They kept on doing it.) A normally terrestrial animal (eg dog) forced to fight while swimming is more likely to inhale water than otherwise. Enough to drown when inhaled into the lungs is around 1 mL for a human, and presumably the same for an animal of the same body mass.
Somehow, our African ancestors survived in an African environment dominated by big cats (nb not tigers.) Humans have longer legs than arms, the reverse of I think the case in all other primates. This makes it hard to climb trees (a cat specialty anyway) but easier to wade into water which is over a cat’s head..
.The Hardy-Morgan aquatic ape hypothesis beats the pants off anything else I have seen, and can explain human features like hairless, sweating bodies better than any rival theory can,
But the clincher IMHO is night vision. Humans don’t have it the way the big cats do. To survive on the African savannah at night when you are blind and the animals hunting you are not takes some doing. Best to put a moat between you and them.
Tiny side note – yes about the longer legs than arms and difference from the other primates. This is why we can’t be quadripedal – evolution took that away some millions of years ago. It’s always annoyed me that Truffaut’s L’enfant sauvage has the wild child running around quadripedally as if that were the natural state and bipedal were the product of CiviliZation. Nonsense. Our bodies just don’t do that well or easily. Props to the child actor who made it look easy; must have been agony.
iknklast:
Sorry. Cross-posted.
Yes. It is dismissed by those who adhere to prevailing orthodoxy. They dismiss. They do not refute. At least, I have not seen any argument that explains the facts (like for example, poor to non-existent night vision cited above, and water-profligate sweating). But I would be genuinely grateful if you could refer me to a source that does.
Omar, it’s also important to note that there’s little in the way of empirical evidence for aquatic ape theory. It’s a nice story and superficially plausible but it isn’t really supported by evolutionary science. If it’s dismissed rather than refuted, that’s because there isn’t really all that much to refute other than an interesting hypothesis.
latsot:
1. There is more empirical evidence for Aquatic Ape Theory (AAT) than there is for its main rival: the conventional-wisdom savannah theory.
I don’t see what your problem is. It fits in beautifully with neo-Darwinism. But Sir Alister Hardy, as I recall, waited until he had retired as an academic biologist before announcing it. Wise move, IMHO.
(choke! caaargh! splutter! hawk! spit!* WIKIPEDIA!!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquatic_ape_hypothesis )
Hardy I would say knew that he was out of step with academic fashion. I would have far more respect for academics if they had not rushed like lemmings over the cliff of postmodernism (PoMo). (Or should that be into the crocodile-infested swamp of PoMo?
2.
Well you can’t prove a negative. But if you mean it is not academically fashionable, then given the way so many academics eagerly lined up so eagerly to swallow the PoMo fraud, I would call that a point in its favour.
3.
Well, the same could be said of Darwinâs still-not-clinched and rather simple idea, and probably was. I read what you say as âIt is just not fashionable.â
AoS, I’m old. I was taught to regard the infinitive as one word, never to be split.
…….NO.
Omar:
You shouldn’t, because that’s not what I’m saying at all.
Omar, you surely don’t think all academics are postmodernists, just by virtue of being academics, do you?
llatsot:
At #31 you said (in full):
… little in the way of empirical evidence … a nice story and superficially plausible … isnât really supported by evolutionary science. …. isnât really all that much to refute … interesting hypothesis.
If by that you mean that mainstream specialist biologists keep clear of it because it is outside their specialties, I am inclined to agree. But that does not invalidate it.
Invalidation only takes place when the existing paradigm cannot explain the facts as well as the challenger theory.
So what would change “a nice story and superficially plausible” into “a nice story and fundamentally plausible?â Please be specific. IMHO that word ‘superficially’ functions there in your post in the capacity of a smokescreen.
OB: No. But what does amaze me is how far the rampage of the PoMo goat was able to go in academia before attacks on it began, it was knocked on the head, and its high priests started looking either for cover or the nearest exit.
I am not an academic, but I am a keen student of Orwell, Koestler and other such thinkers.
I don’t really get the Wikipedia-hate that I encounter among my colleagues and various people online.
First, some of it is hilarious. I remember for some reason looking up ‘halloumi’ on Wikipedia and discovering this simmering Greek/Turkish culture war around cheese, which I had had no idea about.
Second, years ago a friend of mine told me how much he loathed Wikipedia (all of it, I guess) because he’d read an article that had misquoted someone whose work he was familiar with. I pointed out to him that if he was that offended about it it was possible for him to create an account and edit the quotation. (I have a Wikipedia account, but have only edited a handful of articles, and probably haven’t used it in more than a decade–I know there’s been a push to get a larger segment of the population involved in sharing their knowledge, but don’t know how successful it’s been.)
Third, I used to tell my first-year university students that although I never wanted to see them cite Wikipedia in a paper I was happy for them to use it as a starting point/guide to further investigation, if they were unfamiliar with a topic; they could start by scrolling all the way down to the Sources/External links headings and then using their scholarly judgment.
And I didn’t say it did. Omar, you seem to be taking this personally and I have no intention of arguing with you or further derailing the comments. What you’re asking is beyond the scope of a forum like this. To be specific, we’d have to nail down some key pieces of the hypothesis and discuss what evidence would be required to support it, then we’d have to see if that evidence exists. And we still wouldn’t be anywhere near done.
That, I suggest, is rather beyond the scope of both this argument and either of our areas of competence. If you regard that as a smokescreen then fine, you win.
guest, I agree and shortly after I’ve finished this comment I will know a lot more than I do now about Great Turkish/Greek Cheese Wars. Wikipedia serves the purpose it was intended to and does it very well. It’s no use as a primary source (although see my anecdote below) but still a great starting point, as you say. Inaccuracies are found in more traditionally curated encyclopaedia too, and they’re a damn sight more difficult to fix.
Anecdote:
A student of mine was told by a member of his thesis committee to make only one correction on his PhD thesis, which was to remove a citation from Wikipedia. His thesis was about Wikipedia and he was citing a passage from Wikipedia about itself. We wasted a good ten minutes of the meeting arguing about it before we’d reached about nine levels of meta and I called a halt and just agreed to advise the student to remove the reference.
Thank you, I am pleased to have some backup on this controversial position. Just looked at the ‘halloumi’ page, which currently contains only faint echoes of the Cheese Wars, but you can probably find the full history in the talk/edit/view history pages.
‘Inaccuracies are found in more traditionally curated encyclopaedia too, and theyâre a damn sight more difficult to fix.’ Yes, exactly. I think we recognise in both of our professions the value of transparency and collaboration.
latsot @#39:
If you go to http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/about/ you will find, apart from what I think is a tuly charming photo of OB in pensive mode, what I would call the B&W mission statement. Google âbutterflies and wheelsâ and you get the subtitle âdiscussing all the things.â
B&W functions as a wide discussion forum, but one narrowing down as necessary. An academic I know tells me that in order to keep up with developments, his kind these days have to become increasingly specialised and their fields increasingly narrow (or decreasingly wide if you would prefer). So in his words,â you head towards knowing everything about nothing.â But while I do not think that a forum like this one has much business discussing for example, the finer details of quantum physics, it does not mean that quantum physics cannot be referred to in any way, or cannot be relevant to any wider discussion, though such obviously should not spread out like Brownâs cows.
We who visit this site obviously have many backgrounds, but I have yet to encounter a single visitor whom I would call a fool.
Nature has set this universe and this planet up as it is, and the task of intelligent investigators is to find out as much as possible about it. As far as we know, we humans acting collectively over time are the beings capable of the deepest understanding of all; that we know about, though there may be others out there.
How we humans have come to be the way we are is I think a valid question for discussion here, in this universe where everything relates to everything else in one way or another. AAT is relevant to that. And as result of my own investigations into it, it best explains the facts, and it beats the pants off its only present rival, savannah theory. But of course, I am always ready to be persuaded otherwise; especially on this excellent site, where we discuss all the things.
If there was one thing that persuaded me that the aquatic ape hypothesis explained less than the savannah hypothesis, it would be the “What about big cats?” question. Because mosquitoes, crocodiles and hippopotamuses are all more deadly than big cats, and all of them hang around water.
tigger:
An excellent point. Aquatic Ape proponents such as Elaine Morgan set out their answers on these sorts of questions, though I do not have access to them at the moment. On the savannah or the seashore, many a potential ancestor would have become a meal for some carnivore. Either way, it would not have been easy. However humans definitely have more anatomical and physiological features in common with aquatic mammals (eg lack of body hair, subcutaneous fat) than they have with savannah mammals, and these features have to be accounted for.
But the clincher IMHO is night vision or lack thereof in humans cf big cats, deer and all their other prey species. If you can’t survive at night, you can’t survive at all. The trade off appears to me to have been night vision OR excellent colour and distance vision. It appears that it’s one or the other. You can’t have both. We chose the latter. But when everything that fancies you for a meal can see you, and you can’t see them, you are not going to last long.
Hippos to my knowledge avoid the sea, but I may be wrong there. Mozzies abound in mangrove swamps but not so much over open salt water.
Aboriginal people in Northern Australia used to regularly forage for days at a time in crocodile-infested mangrove swamps, beating mozzies by caking themselves all over with thick mud, and sleeping at night up in the mangrove trees. Some perhaps still do. They also would dine on crocs: not on the mature adults so much as on the eggs and hatchlings. But as the man said, life wasn’t meant to be easy.
Just enough people surviving was all that was necessary for the species to continue. I believe that there have been several times in our evolution when all humanoids were almost wiped out altogether; several species failed to make it this far, and we’re the last one. We can’t spend very long in water. It’s not just mozzies and crocs; there are snakes and leeches too, and all kinds of horrific diseases (despite the niche fad, women really should not give birth in water).
I can see very well at night time, outdoors. It isn’t totally dark most nights. And it’s not just sight which warns us of predators – hearing is useful, too. Family bands of humans, like other apes, would have had sentries; and since humans didn’t have the culture of staying awake all day and sleeping all night (which is a modern invention to provide workers for factories and offices), but had periods of sleeping and wakefulness right up until the industrial revolution, they wouldn’t have found that onerous.
Unlike aquatic mammals, humans cannot hold our breath for very long at all – even those who have years of training can only manage a few minutes.
(https://www.outsideonline.com/1784106/how-long-can-humans-hold-their-breath)
Marine mammals, on the other hand, have no trouble staying underwater without breathing for an hour or longer – they have so much myoglobin in their muscles that they look black; humans have about ten times less.
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/352888
It appears to me that we haven’t evolved to spend any significant time in water, although we are so intelligent that we have worked out how to exploit every ecological niche on the planet (and even partly off it!) despite being evolutionarily unsuited.
As for being naked, that really helps a human to keep from cooking when running long distances over a long period of time in a hot climate. Humans can chase down much faster prey simply by following them relentlessly until the animals collapse from heat exhaustion. Retaining hair on the head protects the skull from direct sunlight.
Enough arboreal primates use weapons for it to be a reasonable conclusion that our ancestors did too, before making a life almost entirely on the ground (tree climbing for collecting fruit still continues to this day).
AAT does not contend that we are fish, seals, or cetaceans. We are land-based bipedal apes, with legs longer than arms, and AAT provides a credible evolutionary path from chimpanzee-like arboreal ancestors to our present state. More credible IMHO than savannah theory, the only other contender.
Elaine Morgan popularised it in The Descent of Woman giving it a feminist slant at the same time, which divided her supporters and opponents along sexual politics linesl. Off to a flying start there. A good account of the whole thing is at https://www.theguardian.com/education/2003/may/01/academicexperts.highereducation. (Morgan has had no formal science training, but then again, neither did Charles Darwin.)
From the Guardian article: “It had become increasingly important to her to write something that would appeal to scientists. ‘The establishment had treated me with total horror and contempt, and also some resentment because it was a bestseller. I was an upstart, in it for the money, totally ignorant.’
She believes the upset was greater because she was contradicting those with a vested interest in the status quo. ‘If it had come from somewhere in their own seminars, they could have steered it along and had some input and got some credit for it.’ The scientific community’s refusal to engage with her arguments remains a frustration.”
I should have referred to Elaine Morgan (7 November 1920 â 12 July 2013) in the past tense.
‘(Morgan has had no formal science training, but then again, neither did Charles Darwin.)’
Interesting, I should add her to my list. In my folder of papers to write someday is an outline for one exploring the careers of three women in social science–Jean Liedloff, Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey. I was struck by the fact that none of these women had anything like the kind of academic career a typical male researcher would have had; all ended up in a position to do their research pretty much by accident, and all due to the individual and arbitrary largesse of a man in authority who ‘took a liking’ to them and provided them with an opportunity, which each made the most of. It would be useful for us to acknowledge that as for various reasons women typically don’t have the standard opportunities to ‘rise through the ranks’ in academia that men do we’ve often had to create our own unusual and individual career arcs (this was true of me in my own profession as well). While this is impressive and laudable for the women who do make it, we as a society are ignoring or losing a lot of talent by making it such a challenge for women to pursue conventional careers in science.
And this is exactly why I don’t believe that we could have had an aquatic phase; all aquatic mammals have arms longer than their legs, and the most aquatic, cetaceans, have almost nothing left of their leg bones. For long-armed, short-legged apes spending a significant time in water, the evolutionary pressure would have been in the opposite direction. Our legs didn’t get longer because our ancestors spent a lot of time wading; some of our ancestors may have spent a lot of time wading because their longer legs, which evolved as a result of being nomadic hunters, enabled them to stand in deeper water than shorter legs would have – and that gave them access to fish (spear-fishing). But humans do not like spending a lot of time in the water, and invented boats.
tigger:
As you wish. But before you close your mind completely, have an unhurried read through https://www.theguardian.com/education/2003/may/01/academicexperts.highereducation
Omar, I think this is a wee bit rude:
I haven’t suggested that you have a mind which is closing, just because you are more persuaded by one hypothesis whereas I’m more persuaded by another. I thought we were discussing the strong points for each, as well as we can in such a limited forum as a blog comment section, not that we were so invested in one or other hypothesis that either of us would get annoyed at not persuading the other.
Hey, whaddya mean limited forum, this forum is INFINITE!
But seriously, yes it is a bit rude. I didn’t catch it because I wasn’t really following the aquatic ape discussion, or I would have said something.
Thank you, Ophelia. And I apologise for the unintended insult to the size of your forum.
I intend no insult to Omar, nor Elaine Morgan, when I admit that I am no scholar; I do not have access to university archives or learned journals, and so must draw my conclusions from the publicly-available literature.
My understanding is that fat distribution in humans is different to that in aquatic species, and that we’re not actually hairless, just that most of our bodies have finer hair than is common in other apes (although I have known a few men who were considerably hairier than any other ape I have seen).
What I have been able to read concerning the aquatic ape hypothesis over the decades since the publication of Descent of Woman* does not convince me that it is a necessary insertion in the commonly-accepted narrative; of course, I would love it to be true that a woman – and a non-scientist at that – overturned the accepted patriarchal paradigm! There has been a lot of discovery going on since her book was published, so I did read some articles for this comment. The best two are Herman Pontzer (Dept. of Anthropology, Hunter College; New York Consortium for Evolutionary Primatology), from 2012 and Discovery of Early Hominins, from the same year.
*I should re-read it, it has been a long time.
Sorry, Ophelia. Borked the links.
What’s wrong with the links?
They were supposed to be smart links. But, since they seem to work, I don’t mind.
Overview of Hominin Evolution
By: Herman Pontzer (Dept. of Anthropology, Hunter College; New York Consortium for Evolutionary Primatology), from 2012 and Discovery of Early Hominins, from the same year.
@Aos
#12
Hey, if water isn’t good enough for Earth, Wind, and Fire, it isn’t good enough for me.
That’s the way of the world.
tigger:
Sorry. I read that to say “I have made up my mind on the subject.”
See #28. The most powerful argument in favour of AAT IMHO is night vision; minimal in humans and brilliant in the savannah-dwelling carnivores inclined to dine on humans. If you can’t survive at night, you can’t survive at all. End of story.
Taking to water to evade carnivores or to place yourself on far more equal terms with them if it comes to a fight for survival makes sense to me. As I said, bipedal kangaroos did it before Australian pastoral lands were fenced.
The fact that Sir Alister Hardy waited until he had retired to announce the AAT speaks volumes for the power of fashion “commonly-accepted narrative” in academia IMHO; of which PoMo is merely the latest example. ‘It is not acceptable because it is not commonly accepted’ should itself not be accepted; certainly not by those claiming to be open-minded and free thinkers.