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WHAT talk Francesca Mansfield 7.8.22

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littor...@gmail.com

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Aug 1, 2022, 6:57:04 AM8/1/22
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Dear One and All,
Please consider yourself most cordially invited to the 10th in our WHAT Talks series, this coming Sunday (7th August) at 8pm (West Australian Time).
The Zoom link is at the end of this email. Please feel free to copy this email to anyone who you think might be interested in why we are so different from our chimpanzee and gorilla cousins. Note that the invite to the meeting states a 7:30 pm start, but this is just to allow a few people to join early.
The meeting is scheduled to start on the hour at 8pm and will last about an hour.
This month, we are very lucky to have Francesca Mansfield give our talk. Like many of us, she was inspired (at the age of 17!) by Elaine Morgan to take a passionate interest in the fascinating idea that humans may have had a more aquatic past. After Elaine's book "The Descent of Woman", she has devoured pretty much everything she could read on the subject.
Francesca gave birth to her first child in water, inspired by AAT and one of guest speakers Michel Odent, and her belief that it would be a more natural, easier and relatively less painful form of childbirth (it was).
Since 2015 she’s been maintaining a website (see link below) which tries to keep up with scientific discoveries in support of AAT. Many of the speakers on WHAT talks are mentioned, although she says she’s lapsed a little in recent years as she’s had little time to keep it updated.
Francesca currently works as a yacht broker/charter operator in Greece. She’s always been drawn to the sea and loves being in it, or on it, whenever she can!
She is currently researching / writing a book (working title: Semi-aquatic Human Ancestors – the Evolution of a Theory), based on the accumulating scientific evidence that supports aquatic or semi-aquatic adaptations in humans (an outline of which will be covered in the talk).
Francesca's Web Site: http://aquatic-human-ancestor.org/

Semi-Aquatic Human Ancestors
Possible aquatic adaptations in human - Arguments for the aquatic ape hypothesis and related water-based models
Notes: The diagram demonstrates the arguments proposed in the aquatic ape hypothesis (AAH) and related water-based models (e.g. the shore-based diet model), that swimming, diving, and a semi-aquatic lifestyle may have influenced human evolution, caused numerous adaptations in human ...
aquatic-human-ancestor.org
I for one am really looking forward to hear her angle on some of the concepts that I have been thinking about for so long.

Her talk is entitled...
Semi-Aquatic Human Ancestors: when, where & why?

AAT supporters agree that water has played a morphological role in the evolution of human ancestors, but there remains much debate and little consensus regarding when, where and why this might have happened. Elaine Morgan and many others talked about somewhere in East Africa, perhaps Afar or the Rift valley during the Pliocene, as this is where/when the oldest “hominins” with bipedal modifications seem to appear, but the science is very weak, with no clear answers about why what happened to human ancestors didn’t happen also to the extant great apes, and scientists to this day have still not been able to draw any definitive conclusions regarding the phylogenetic relationships between australopithecines and Homo species.
It was these unanswered questions that prompted me to delve deeper into the prevailing scientific evidence, established facts and generally accepted paradigms concerning human evolution. To understand when, where and why our ancestors’ aquatic interlude may have occurred, I decided to start my research from the time when the first apes diverged from other primates, around 25 million years ago, and study the evidence right up to the emergence of clearly definable Homo genus, approximately 2 million years ago. What I discovered surprised me. There wasn’t a single aquatic interlude for a brief window of time – there were many, covering many millennia, and it wasn’t just Homo species that carry the scars of an aquatic history, but some of our closest cousins too. Nevertheless, the evidence I researched does point to a single defining period for when the split between Pan – the chimpanzee lineage – and Homo occurred, a location where a semi-aquatic existence wasn’t just convenient, but essential, and a geological event that may provide the answer to why this happened.

Francesca Mansfield

Please see our web site for a set of related papers on her talk and more information https://whattalks.com/talks.

DD'eDeN aka note/nickname/alas_my_loves

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Aug 1, 2022, 2:31:57 PM8/1/22
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Where did they sleep?

littor...@gmail.com

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Aug 1, 2022, 4:21:35 PM8/1/22
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Op maandag 1 augustus 2022 om 20:31:57 UTC+2 schreef DD'eDeN aka note/nickname/alas_my_loves:

> Where did they sleep?

In a hole in the savanna, of course.
:-DDD

DD'eDeN aka note/nickname/alas_my_loves

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Aug 1, 2022, 8:32:29 PM8/1/22
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Some Khoisan do that, but most sleep in dome huts.

Where do you sleep? Underwater?

littor...@gmail.com

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Aug 3, 2022, 3:10:13 PM8/3/22
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littor...@gmail.com

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Aug 3, 2022, 3:13:15 PM8/3/22
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The sheltered ground ape:

> Where do you sleep? Underwater?

My little boy,
please finally grow up:
pregnant women more easily give birth in water than outside...

DD'eDeN aka note/nickname/alas_my_loves

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Aug 3, 2022, 4:11:23 PM8/3/22
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Now you want to call Congo Pygmy women "aquatic"?? They make and sleep in dome huts on the forest floor, and birth in shallow crystalline streams. Freshwater, like Trinil.
Do you sleep in the ocean?

littor...@gmail.com

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Aug 3, 2022, 6:25:14 PM8/3/22
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Op woensdag 3 augustus 2022 om 22:11:23 UTC+2 schreef sheltered ground ape:

> Now you want to call Congo Pygmy women "aquatic"??

???
My little little little boy, nobody is speaking about congo pygmies aquatic or not...
Waste your own time, keep sheltering in the ground.

DD'eDeN aka note/nickname/alas_my_loves

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Aug 4, 2022, 9:13:51 AM8/4/22
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Lol!

littor...@gmail.com

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Aug 7, 2022, 5:01:33 AM8/7/22
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Don't forget !
ttps://whattalks.com/talks.

_____

Op maandag 1 augustus 2022 om 12:57:04 UTC+2 schreef littor...@gmail.com:

littor...@gmail.com

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Aug 7, 2022, 10:22:46 AM8/7/22
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Op zondag 7 augustus 2022 om 11:01:33 UTC+2 schreef littor...@gmail.com:

> Don't forget ! https://whattalks.com/talks.

It was an excellent talk! I think you can google it tomorrow.
_________
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