“SMASHING a paradigm is rejuvenating,” says Phillip Tobias. He should know.
To mark his 70th birthday five years ago, Tobias urged his fellow
palaeoanthropologists to ditch one of the central dogmas of human
evolution—the notion that our ancestors made their first great advance
towards human form by swinging out of the forest and into the open savannah,
where they began walking upright. “Open the window, and throw out the savannah
hypothesis,” was Tobias’s rallying call.
Today, that paradigm has been so thoroughly bashed that some people argue it
never really existed. But Tobias isn’t finished yet. Although physically frail,
when he gets up on the podium he has the delivery and mental agility of a man
half his age. And this giant of palaeoanthropology is once again challenging his
audience. If humanity wasn’t born out of a move into Africa’s hot, open spaces,
then how? “It’s time to open our minds,” says Tobias, a professor at the
University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He wants the academic establishment
to consider the heretical idea that we were born of water.
Forty years ago, New Scientist published a feature entitled, “Was
man more aquatic in the past?” (17 March 1960, p 642). In it, Alister Hardy, a
distinguished biological oceanographer and Fellow of the Royal Society, went
public with an idea that he had sat on for almost three decades, fearing it
would jeopardise his career. “My thesis,” he wrote, “is that a branch of the
primitive ape-stock was forced by competition from life in the trees to feed on
the seashores.” Hardy argued that if our ancestors were semi-aquatic, it ...