Aquatic Ape Hypothesis - Reception

Reception

The AAH has received little serious attention or acceptance from mainstream paleoanthropologists, has been met with significant skepticism and is not considered a strong scientific hypothesis. The AAH does not appear to have passed the peer review process, and despite Morgan being praised by various scholars, none of her work has appeared in any academic journals of anthropology or related disciplines. The AAH is thought by some anthropologists to be accepted readily by popular audiences, students and non-specialist scholars because of its simplicity. In 1987 a symposium was held in Valkenburg, the Netherlands, titled "Aquatic Ape: Fact or fiction?", which published its proceedings in 1991. A review of Morgan's book The Scars of Evolution stated that it did not address the central questions of anthropology – how the human and chimpanzee gene lines diverged – which was why it was ignored by the scholarly community. The review also stated that Morgan ignored the fossil record and skirted the absence of evidence that australopithecine underwent any adaptations to water, making the hypothesis impossible to validate from fossils.

Morgan has claimed the AAH was rejected for a variety of reasons unrelated to its explanatory power: old academics were protecting their careers, sexism on the part of male researchers, and her status as a non-academic intruding on academic debates. Despite modifications to the hypothesis and occasional forays into scientific conferences, the AAH has neither been accepted as a mainstream theory nor managed to venture a genuine challenge to orthodox theories of human evolution.

Morgan's critics have claimed that the appeal of AAH can be explained in several ways:

1. The hypothesis appears to offer absolute answers, which appeals more to students and the public than the qualified and reserved explanations offered by mainstream science.
2. Unusual ideas challenge the authority of science and scientists, which appeals to anti-establishment sentiments.
3. The AAH as developed by Morgan has a strong feminist component, which particularly appeals to a specific, feminist audience.
4. The AAH can be explained simply and easily, lacking the myriad details and complicated theorizing involved in dealing with primary sources and materials.
5. The AAH uses negative arguments, pointing to the flaws and gaps in conventional theories; though the criticisms of mainstream science and theories can be legitimate, the flaws in one theory do not automatically prove a proposed alternative is true.
6. The consensus views of conventional anthropology are complicated, require specialized knowledge and qualified answers, and the investment of considerable time to understand.

John D. Hawks, along with PZ Myers and fellow ScienceBlogs paleontologist Greg Laden recommend the website "Aquatic Ape Theory: Sink or Swim?" by Jim Moore as a resource on the topic.

Anthropologist Colin Groves has stated that Morgan's theories are sophisticated enough that they should be taken seriously as a possible explanation for hominin divergence and Carsten Niemitz has found more recent, weaker versions of the hypothesis more acceptable, approaching some of his own theories on human evolution.