Replies

The original human diet had to be some combination of fruit and shellfish. Elaine Morgan is almost certainly correct in thinking humans originally lived in water and whether a person believes in evolution is pretty much irrelevant to that question. Humans would have eaten shellfish which we could deal with with our hands and which fish can't do anything with, and fruit which they went up on shore for. Things like wheat and greens would be tastes acquired much later and it's far from obvious that anything like that is good for us.

Elaine Morgan has some smart ideas but is way off where it counts. The first division between hominids and apes was bipedalism. The next important step was long distance running. Nearly every difference between apes and pre-humans is directly related to the ability to not just run 50+ miles in a day but the ability to average 40-50 miles a day long term. It's open to speculation as to how that evolution occurred but chasing herds and picking up the ones who dropped from exhaustion is a good guess.

Less than 1 million years ago, bipedal - long distance running hominids covered the entire EuroAsian and African continuant's.

All currently living humans are descended from a relatively small tribe of such prehumans who lived on the beach between South Africa and Ethiopia 200.000 years ago. Their lifestyle (up until glacier melting led to inland rivers about 50.000 years ago) probably consisted of running the 5-20 mile lengths of beach and swimming across the dividing channels which range up to a mile or more. Such a beach/outer reef lifestyle would include exploiting the combination of offshore diving, bayside gathering, and a daily jog to beach comb for survival. In other words, humans are evolved to run and swim. Elaine is correct that we evolved to swim but she leaves out the more important long distance running part.

Morgan's claim was that a chunk of Africa was separated from the rest, and humans did all their evolving there, out of the way of other primates, other competitors, and predators. She thinks hair grows on the head because the small children clung to it. And there's plenty more where that came from. It's largely feminist drivel, spelled out in "The Descent of Woman". However, she can be nice to have around, because she's always on the lookout for evidence of an isolated environment for human evolution:

The Scars of Evolution
by Elaine Morgan
"The most remarkable aspect of Todaro's discovery emerged when he examined Homo Sapiens for the 'baboon marker'. It was not there... Todaro drew one firm conclusion. 'The ancestors of man did not develop in a geographical area where they would have been in contact with the baboon. I would argue that the data we are presenting imply a non-African origin of man millions of years ago.'"

Primary Literature by Jonathan Marks
Benveniste, Raoul E. and Todaro, George J. (1976) Evolution of type C viral genes: Evidence for an Asian origin of man. Nature, 261:101-107. This study also applied DNA hybridization to the apes. They found a 3-way split.
socrates.berkeley.edu/~jonmarks/biblio.html