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Re: What did AAT Supposedly eat?
Phillip Bigelow (n8010095@henson.cc.wwu.edu)
Thu, 5 Jan 1995 15:43:11 GMT
fignet04.mikea@eds.com (Michael Allen) writes:
>I would like to know what the AAT supposedly subsisted on.
>Also, by the theory, why did the AAT move to the savannah?
Hypothesizing what "AAT" ate is akin to building a hypothesis based on a
pre-existing hypothesis. It is pointless. We don't have any AAT fossils to
prove that such an animal even exists, leave alone that it had specific diet
requirements. There are wild speculations, and I am sure that other posters
that support the AAT will gleefully share with you Morgan's story on
this. The diet requirements of an imaginary animal such as AA, is analogous
to asking about the life-span of Bigfoot. Your question is a good one,
however. It's trying to answer it that is a waste of time.
Regarding your question on why would an aquatic ape move to the savannah
later in it's hypothesized existance: This is an extremely confusing aspect
of the AAT. The proponents hypothesize that something forced the aquatic
ape out of the water and onto the savannah, where the animal would have been
"better suited for savannah existance than if it had come straight from the
forest". The problem with this logic is that, in other discussion threads
here, the proponents will energetically point out to us that modern humans
are presently very ill-equiped to exist on the savannah. The proponents
tell us that sweating, sub-cutaneous fat, and a host of other
character traits in modern humans make us poorly adapted for the savannah.
If their logic is correct, there would be no evolutionary pressure for these
"poorly-equiped" aquatic apes to venture out onto the savannah. Why would
such a creature invade such an environmentally hostile niche? Yet, a host of
modern humans presently live on the savannahs, plains, taigas, tundras,
and deserts of the world. The proponents of AAT can't have it both ways.
Either modern humans are well-equiped for savannah existance, or they
aren't.
The second problem with the aquatic ape "return to land" scenario, is
that we don't have a good idea how "aquatic" or "semi-aquatic" the animal
was in the first place. If the hominid was simply a sea-shore or lake-shore
dweller, who occassionally waded into the water to escape from predators or
to gather food, then we basically have a terrestrial hominid, not a
semi-aquatic hominid. In which case, why bother to call the hominid
"aquatic" or "semi-aquatic" in the first place? Read Morgans book "The
Aquatic Ape" (usually found in public libraries). She skillfully avoids the
issue of exactly how aquatic the hypothetical apes hypothetically were.
There is good reason for this avoidance: we don't know if these
creatures even existed.
<pb>
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