I buy Elaine Morgan's arguments: we're bare, we're streamlined for the water, we're bipedal (like apes are when the wade in the water), we have voluntary breath control, and we have external fat deposits.

The pollens don't match! The only option, other than the 2001 monolith, would be the aquatic ape theory. The damn barnacles make the fossil evidence impossible.

I read Morgan's "Aquatic Ape" and was impressed by the arguments therein.

First, we are relatively hairless.

Second, as Stephen described it well, our bodies are built for swimming.

Third, seafood is loaded with "brain food," omega 3 fatty acids. I don't buy for a minute the idea that our ancestors' brains were rapidly growing over generations of life on the dry and dusty African savanna.

It's much easier envisioning our ancestors living on seacoasts and estuaries, fishing, cracking open clams, and gobbling up all that nutritious seafood generation after generation.

IMHO: Elaine Morgan's "synthesis" of "savanna" beginnings of humanity and "aquatic" beginnings could be that we evolved to travel ACROSS savannas in order to find the next fishing hole.... We probably exhausted said fishing holes then felt compelled to move on. Perhaps our capability to exhaust one environment after another may be the very thing that pushed us to evolve.

i'd come across this theory somewhere else the past decade and found it quite satisfactory. Will be interesting to see how the scientific community evolves as this information is used/ignored...