ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Ape Aquatic: Scientific Diving, Contested Narratives of Human Evolution, and Environmental Futures, 1960-1969

• In Event: Utopian and Dystopian Sciences

English Abstract

In March of 1960, marine biologist Alister Hardy gave a modest presentation before the British Sub Aqua Club in which he offered a decidedly immodest proposition. Human speciation, he argued, came about as a result of an aquatic history of swimming and diving. Man was to be distinguished among primates as the aquatic ape. Although vehemently contested in some circles, ignored or reviled as pseudoscience among others within the broader scientific community, the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis (AAH) would become an influential part of an emerging conversation about oceanic pasts and futures. When in 1962, Jacques Cousteau predicted that the future of humankind meant evolution into a technologically enhanced marine-terrestrial hybrid, Homo aquaticus, the Aquatic Ape became its historical counterpart in a narrative which situated the oceans as a central agent of human development. This paper examines the conflicting receptions and diverse perspectives which emerged among scientists, technologists, and diving publics to better understand how ideas about human origins and evolutionary possibilities influenced, and were influenced by, emerging Cold War projections of human futures subsea. Becoming enduringly entangled in the popular imagination with contemporaneous aquatic figures like the manfish and the aquanaut, the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis spoke to a desire to understand humans as evolutionarily linked with marine environs via embodied subsea experiences, reworking an earlier idea that commonly appeared in accounts of nineteenth-century helmet divers like J.B. Green, for whom swimming and diving were perceived as natural and instinctual human responses. Although ultimately rejected by the mainstream scientific community, Hardy’s Aquatic Ape Hypothesis exerted important cultural influence toward the naturalization of the relationship between humans and oceans, illustrating the profound material and epistemological effects of contested narratives and scientific controversies. Caught up in a wave of Cold War enthusiasm for pursuing long-term habitation of the seas and viewing marine resources as an endlessly exploitable source of material abundance for human prosperity amid geopolitical and environmental anxieties, such conceptualizations of a blue home for man complicated the construction of the submarine world as an extreme, even hostile “inner space” opposite the “outer space” beyond earth’s atmosphere.

Author

• Elexis Trinity Williams, Cornell University