1
‘It's time somebody told those sanctimonious humbugs - all the nastiness in their own minds and they put it all off onto some poor girl, and start preaching about purity and sin as if she was any different from the rest of us except for worse luck.’
2
‘Baby under water, mole rat underground. Apart from the pachyderms, the only naturally naked land mammals are Homo sapiens and the naked Somalian mole rat.’
3
“Dear Sir, Am returning fur coat as I have no use for it after all; kindly exchange for 1 pr. earlobes and 14 lbs. subcutaneous fat. The corrugator muscles arrived safely and are satisfactory, but both the brain and the penis are 3 sizes too small for present needs, please replace. I could also use a nose, if you have any in stock. And oblige, yrs., N. Ape.”
“It would make it that much harder to delude ourselves that humanity’s ancestors, alone in the animal kingdom, lost their hair by wandering out into the sunshine.”
“A naked woman, wrote William Blake, is the work of God. It has proved surprisingly difficult to account for this phenomenon as the work of natural selection.”
“In short, the fossil record is perfectly compatible with the supposition that at some time between eight and six million years ago, at the north end of the Rift Valley where the most ancient hominid remains have been found, one section of the l.c.a. population found itself living in a watery environment and—whether by choice or under duress—began to adapt to a semi-aquatic existence.”
“The more you think about it, the more impossible it becomes to believe that hunting man discarded his fur to enable himself to become cooler, and at the same time developed a layer of fat, the only possible effect of which would be to make him warmer”.
“Most surviving mammalian orders include species which took to the water, and then evolved specific adaptations for aquatic life. One of the few orders which is generally believed to include no such species is the Primates - to which man belongs. The aquatic theory postulates that one primate did follow that well-trodden path. This primate was the ape that was immediately ancestral to man."
“Walking on two legs does not seem by any means a difficult trick to perform when you belong to a species that has been practicing it for a few million years. Unless, that is, you are fourteen months old and have just tumbled down for the 65th time; or unless you have broken a leg, and not having three to fall back on, are reduced to hopping or hobbling with a stick; or unless you are drunk, or suffering from back ache, or growing old.”
“Nobody has suggested that they turned into mermen and mermaids. They would have been water-adapted apes in the same sense that an otter is a water-adapted mustelid.”
4
‘Water is the only environment on this planet where it costs nothing to be built like a tank.’
‘The carefree pachyderms are the aquatic ones. The walrus in water is as lithe and graceful as a ballerina. The hippopotamus paces the bed of the river as lightly as a moon-walking astronaut.’
‘Can anyone believe that natural selection cursed the Galapagos tortoises with those excruciatingly cumbersome shells on land, where there were no predators around the threaten them? It is much easier to think of them as grounded turtles.’
‘Bipedalism was not always a rare form of locomotion. Creatures like Hadro-saurus and Tyrannosaurus walked everywhere on two legs.’ ‘If we compare human skin with that of the pachyderms, it has a number of unusual features in common with them.’
‘The whales are ‘very likely’ to be a sister group of the hippopotamus. (And the hippopotamus is related to the pig).’
‘The domestic pig has little or no functional hair but some of its wild relatives, like boars and warthogs, have retained their pelage. Or perhaps, rather than retaining it, the re-acquired it.’
‘A bison is nearly eight times as big as a pig but has kept its thick protective coat.’
‘If AAT were true, we would be more streamlined.’ More streamlined than what?’
‘Baby under water, mole rat underground. Apart from the pachyderms, the only naturally naked land mammals are Homo sapiens and the naked Somalian mole rat.’
‘The rhinoceros is a perissodactyl related to the horse and the tapir; the hippopotamus is an artiodactyl related to camels, cattle, sheep and giraffes.’
5
“I felt when I read that page as if the whole evolutionary landscape had been transformed by a blinding flash of light.”
6
‘It takes little or no imagination to speculate why the colour change took place - because white is the colour of snow. It is a kind of convergence. The term convergence is most often used in terms of two unrelated species coming to resemble one another in respect of a whole cluster of features, including general body structure.’
‘Examples are dolphins adopting the same outline as fish, or insectivores from the different continents separately evolving similar silhouettes, with powerful front limbs and long narrow tapering snouts. But the Arctic fox and the Arctic hare and the others have converged in respect of one single trait only.
This conclusion is generally accepted. Nobody argues that it is invalid on the grounds that not all creatures with white pelage are necessarily Arctic or ex-Arctic. There are white egrets and which cockatoos, white horses and white cattle. And it is not rejected on the ground that some residents of polar regions - like the penguins - have not turned white. It is not difficult to see the possibility of an analogy between the evolution of whiteness in an Arctic environment, and the loss of body hair in an aquatic environment. Nearly all extant naked mammals are in some degree aquatic. The exception are the naked Somalian mole rat which never comes to the surface; the group of animals which used to be known as pachyderms; and humans. It is true that by no means all aquatic mammals are naked.’
‘The idea that mouth-breathing is an aquatic adaption is supported by the fact that terrestrial birds are nose-breathers whereas diving birds are mouth-breathers. The walrus, one of the very few mammals with a descended larynx, is also a mouth-breather.’
‘‘Pachyderm’ (from the Greek ‘thick-skinned’) was a word used by zoologists in the last century to refer to a group of animals which seemed to them to fall naturally into a sub-set of mammals; it included such animals as the elephant, the hippopotamus, the rhinoceros and the walrus.’
‘Some pachyderms - walrus, dugong, hippopotamus, and so on - are still wholly or predominately aquatic. The tapir lives in a riverine habitat and the babirusa is a marsh dweller. The terrestrial ones like the rhino and the elephant take every available opportunity to wallow in water or plaster their hides with mud, as if their skins were still uncomfortable ill-adapted to constant exposure to sun and air.’
7
“Economic liberation has turned into a kind of bondage for women because while it’s considered O.K. for them to go out and earn some money they’re still expected to be responsible for all the shopping and cook and cleaning and housework after they come home in the evenings and at weekends.”
8
Bafta Cymru
The British Academy of Film & Television Arts
Gwobr Arbennig
Special Award
2002
Elaine Morgan
9
Women are raising each others’ consciousness every day.
10
Some of Elaine’s best known TV drama titles:
The Burston
Rebellion
Joey
Marie Curie
The Life and Times of David Lloyd George
Fame is the Spur
Off to Philadelphia in the Morning
The Diary of Anne Frank
Testament of Youth
Anne of Avonlea
How Green Was My Valley
Maigret
The Brothers
Dr Finlay’s Casebook
11
Feminism
“Man is the only mammal whose normal method of locomotion is to walk on two legs. A pattern of mammal behavior that emerges only once in the whole history of life on earth takes a great deal of explaining.”
“According to the Book of Genesis, God first created man. Woman was not only an afterthought, but an amenity. For close on two thousand years this holy scripture was believed to justify her subordination and explain her inferiority; for even as a copy she was not a very good copy. There were differences. She was not one of His best efforts.”
“... I thought I’ve got to protest against it. ... I thought ... it doesn’t even make sense. They would say “well of course we became naked because the mighty hunter would get overheated”. She wasn’t overheated. She was left there, stuck. I mean, she was half of the species for God’s sake!”
Scientists
“People are still apt to say: ‘Very well, Wegener was right, but for the wrong reasons.’ His method, if I may venture to say so, was the same as mine.”
“If Hans Christian Andersen were alive today, he might supply a different ending to his tale of The Emperor’s New Clothes. When the little boy cried out: ‘The Emperor has no clothes!’, the mounted bodyguard was given the order ‘Eyes front!’ while an equerry reined in his horse and declared ‘That child is hallucinating.’”
“Would I too have tried to play down the problem if I had been embedded in the system? I hope not, but I cannot be sure. The reluctance to say ‘I was wrong’ goes pretty deep in human nature, including mine.”
“It has been repeatedly asserted (for example on the internet) that there was never such a thing as the ‘savannah theory’, that it was simply a straw man constructed by Elaine Morgan for the pleasure of knocking it down again, and that no reputable scientist can be shown ever to have used the phrase ‘savannah theory’. The last part of that statement is true. I would no more have expected them to use that phrase that I would expect a Creationist to refer to ‘the God theory’ - their faith in it was too strong for that.”
12
“Now I will ask you all to rise and join in the singing of our National Anthem “Hen Wlad Fy Mamau”
13
Elaine Morgan Quotes
“I like human beings, and you’re one of those, aren’t you?”
“Although my father was unemployed for many years when I was a child, they were among the happiest of my life.”
“I learned my trade in the era of snoek and Spam”
“I felt like one of the pioneer women of covered wagon days”.
“Why do you live in Mountain Ash? I keep getting asked this, not in Mountain Ash, but when I’m in London or anywhere, “Why do you live out there? I mean, there’s so much interesting going on in London —opera and the theatre and the exhibitions, and all of that. I meet such interesting people.” Well, I find most people are interesting, wherever you live. I like it here. I understand the people here. I’m relaxed here. I think if you decide, I mean this social mobility, to decide I’m going to be upwardly mobile, and mix with a different lot of people. I think you waste an awful lot of psychic energy, trying to translate yourself into something different. It’s much more comfortable and easier, I think, to stay where you were born. And I’ve found it a very healthy sort of community to grow up in. Because when I was growing up... For one thing it’s classless. When Kingsley Amis came to Wales, he said that’s one thing about it, it’s classless. We were all in the same boat together, and people helped each other, and they knew that if they were going to make a better world, and this valley was full of people who were determined to make a better world, they knew they’d have to do it themselves. And above all, they had a lot of self-respect. “You’re as good as anybody else, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.” So I’ve been grateful for that and you have to stay in this kind of community.”
14
It was the end of the most wonderful day in Kitty’s life and she was lying on her back on the pile of sweet-smelling hay
15
Elaine Neville Morgan
1920 - 2013
Spouse
Moiren Waldo Parry Morgan
Children
John Dylan, Gareth, Huw
Parents
Olive Irene Neville & William Flody
Occupation
Screen Writer, Journalist, Author
16
“Phillip Tobias observed in a lecture in London: ‘All the former savannah supporters (including myself ) must now swallow our words.”
17
Thank You Wendy
18
'The idea that mouth-breathing is an aquatic adaption is supported by the fact that terrestrial birds are nose-breathers whereas diving birds are mouth-breathers. The walrus, one of the very few mammals with a descended larynx, is also a mouth-breather.’
19
“Because all our governance is based on male bonding, and male bonding on at best a low-powered rumbling of aggression, accompanied by the hallucinatory visions which keep that aggression alive, we are constantly in danger of seeing our communities revert at intervals into the horrible agonic semblance of a troop of baboons. Baboons, moreover, with their finger on the button that can fire off an H-bomb.”
20
“I like human beings, and you’re one of those, aren’t you?” “Although my father was unemployed for many years when I was a child, they were among the happiest of my life.” “I learned my trade in the era of snoek and Spam” “I felt like one of the pioneer women of covered wagon days”.