The film covers the story of Elaine Morgan and her dogged and successful quest to pierce the official scientific orthodoxy, by promoting a hypothesis for an aquatic phase in the development of the human phenotype. The idea that an important phase of human evolution took place in the water helps to explain our relative hairlessness in comparison to other primates, as well as the layer of fat beneath our skin, our being the only bipedal mammals and our ability to control our breathing, which is a prerequisite for the power of speech, along with many other distinctively human traits.
Often described as a “Welsh housewife” by the anthropologists whom she challenged, Morgan was a actually a successful writer of several TV series’ on BBC. Her first foray into scientific writing was in the early 1970s and she became increasingly interested in evolutionary anthropology after encountering the work of marine biologist, Alister Hardy.
Hardy, who specialized in marine mammals says, he had an “a-ha!” moment when he realized that the insulating layer of blubber, found in ALL marine mammals is essentially the same thing that humans have (and which we seek to shed and lose, at tremendous cost, difficulty and frustration, in some cases).
So entrenched was the dogma of Homo sapiens being forged in the dry African savannah, Hardy had to keep his insights private, lest he destroy his scientific career and lose all respect from his fellow biologists.
Morgan has been increasingly vindicated in the 21st century, with some well-known scientists publicly agreeing with her view, including David Attenborough. In 2009, Morgan was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to literature and to education. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature the same year. In 2016, she was named as one of “the 50 greatest Welsh men and women of all time”.
The video quality is very poor in this copy of the film but this does make for some interesting visual artifacts.