Gaia: Arguments with Our Lady Earth (extract #2)

We aren’t nearly as unique as we think we are.

Me: Why do you call us river apes instead of human?

Gaia: All conscious species call themselves human, people, men and women in their languages. Just as the Rainbow People were descended from therapod dinosaurs that also produced the birds, so the current spawning species of human is descended from apes who became partially adapted to water — river apes.

In these italic sections I will explain where some of the things here may come from and what they mean. You don’t need to read these bits if you don’t want to.

Elaine Morgan introduced me to the quite old but still not respectable theory that humans became bipedal, chubby, hairless and learnt to control their breathing consciously while living by the sea about three or four million years ago. Personally I think it was while they were living beside the lakes and rivers in the African Rift Valley and also perhaps in the swampy areas at the head of the Red Sea while the sea levels were low. We prefer sweet water to swim and bathe in, not sea water.

This theory is still looked down on by orthodox palaeontologists, at least partly because Elaine Morgan’s point was that the Man-the-Upright-Hunter theory of our evolution makes no sense when you talk about actual…