(Originally published in Pelagic Ontology Letters Spring, 1981)
Earlier this year I was standing on the Victorian coast enjoying a scene of breathtaking beauty. The site has no official name on the maps but is found near Cape Otway, a few miles from the wreck of the 19th century cargo ship, Eric The Red. It’s a rocky shoreline carved from a blue-grey sandstone conglomerate decorated with ribbons of anthracitic coal and studded with barnacles, shipworms and multicoloured starfish (Meridiastra calcar). As I gazed into a rock pool full of huge kelp blades undulating back and forth agreeably with the constant pull of the tide, a thought hit me. It was a sudden thought but one of such truth and simplicity that I have been unable to disavow it: Ever since we left the water, our problems started.
The vertebrate lineage began exploring the terrestrial realm in the late-Devonian (~370 million years ago) and humans, the most self-consciously conscious of tetrapods, have been filled with a sense of longing for the marine world ever since. Early in our family’s history, our ancestors the noble fishes, enjoyed the constant warmth and buoyancy of our maternal ocean. For millions of years, not a single vertebrate* deigned to drag themselves into the infernal terrestrial realm and deal with it’s painful temperature fluctuations, unforgiving gravity and constant barrage of deadly ultraviolet radiation. Until one day, an obscure, opportunistic amphibian ruined everything by hauling themselves out of the sea and wedding our destiny to dry land.
It’s evidently not just old scientists musing on obscure philosophical concepts who feel this existential yearning for our saltwater birthplace**: look at any beach, any point where the terrestrial world meets the ocean and you will find scores of people throwing themselves back in. Humanity has branched out into a multitude of highly varied cultures and societies, and yet almost every one of them has spent a considerable amount of time and energy to situate themselves as close to the ocean as was possible. The sea is only partially acquiescent with this - constantly sending us back - but we continue to embrace her as if acting out the communal regret we feel in leaving, begging to be taken back.
As I write this, I feel a familiar ache in my back - the inevitable curse of the middle-aged Homo sapiens. I am condemned to experience this dull agony due to having descended from quadrupedal forebears who’s own body plan was jerry-rigged via evolution with what they had inherited from the aquatically adapted fishes. The end result for me is that instead of being in the centre of the human torso, the load-bearing spinal column is positioned at the back; an architecture unacceptable to even the most amateur of home handymen. If the creator deity designed my patio, I would have had him fired. In reality, all land dwelling vertebrates are imperfect, modified fishes; just barely getting by with limbs that are merely refashioned fins, lungs that are inverted gills.
And the gravity! Without the support of the dense seawater, the gravity pulls on me like — but before this becomes a tedious list of pathological complaints from an old fart, we must acknowledge the spiritual loss due to our emigration from the ocean. Who doesn't feel that they are missing out on something terribly special when they gaze down into the kaleidoscopic world of the deep? The corals, the mollusks, in the oceanic world, even the algae*** are vibrant and beautiful. On land we are stuck with a dull, dichromatic palette of muddy browns and greens with only rare glimpses of real colour and its effect on the soul is draining. I am certainly an appreciator of all facets of the natural world, but nothing on the land can possibly compare to the sheer otherworldliness and majesty of the undersea realm.
Well, tides go out and tides come in again. Other members of our mammalian tribe such as the whales, dolphins, seals and sea lions, dugongs and manatees returned to sea; why not us? Perhaps the future direction of humanity’s ongoing evolution is a homecoming to the environment that we so unwisely spurned around 370 million years ago. The terrestrial experiment has been successful in many pragmatic ways, but we are metaphysically poorer for it.
* Although the invertebrates had us beat onto the land by over 50 million years! A hollow victory if ever there was one.
** I, in particular may be thought of as having a personal stake in this as my family name, you may have guessed, translates as ‘ocean’ in my father’s native Estonian tongue.
*** In fact, the colouration of our oceanic algae is so distinctive, that many major divisions within the group were originally elucidated on the basis of these characteristics. Every layman has heard of blue-green algae (Cyanobacteria), but it is worth exploring all the families in their variously hued glory; Chlorophyta (green algae), Rhodophyta (red algae), Phaeophyceae (brown algae), Chrysophyceae (golden-brown algae) and Xanthophyceae (yellow-green algae).
Earlier this year I was standing on the Victorian coast enjoying a scene of breathtaking beauty. The site has no official name on the maps but is found near Cape Otway, a few miles from the wreck of the 19th century cargo ship, Eric The Red. It’s a rocky shoreline carved from a blue-grey sandstone conglomerate decorated with ribbons of anthracitic coal and studded with barnacles, shipworms and multicoloured starfish (Meridiastra calcar). As I gazed into a rock pool full of huge kelp blades undulating back and forth agreeably with the constant pull of the tide, a thought hit me. It was a sudden thought but one of such truth and simplicity that I have been unable to disavow it: Ever since we left the water, our problems started.
The vertebrate lineage began exploring the terrestrial realm in the late-Devonian (~370 million years ago) and humans, the most self-consciously conscious of tetrapods, have been filled with a sense of longing for the marine world ever since. Early in our family’s history, our ancestors the noble fishes, enjoyed the constant warmth and buoyancy of our maternal ocean. For millions of years, not a single vertebrate* deigned to drag themselves into the infernal terrestrial realm and deal with it’s painful temperature fluctuations, unforgiving gravity and constant barrage of deadly ultraviolet radiation. Until one day, an obscure, opportunistic amphibian ruined everything by hauling themselves out of the sea and wedding our destiny to dry land.
It’s evidently not just old scientists musing on obscure philosophical concepts who feel this existential yearning for our saltwater birthplace**: look at any beach, any point where the terrestrial world meets the ocean and you will find scores of people throwing themselves back in. Humanity has branched out into a multitude of highly varied cultures and societies, and yet almost every one of them has spent a considerable amount of time and energy to situate themselves as close to the ocean as was possible. The sea is only partially acquiescent with this - constantly sending us back - but we continue to embrace her as if acting out the communal regret we feel in leaving, begging to be taken back.
As I write this, I feel a familiar ache in my back - the inevitable curse of the middle-aged Homo sapiens. I am condemned to experience this dull agony due to having descended from quadrupedal forebears who’s own body plan was jerry-rigged via evolution with what they had inherited from the aquatically adapted fishes. The end result for me is that instead of being in the centre of the human torso, the load-bearing spinal column is positioned at the back; an architecture unacceptable to even the most amateur of home handymen. If the creator deity designed my patio, I would have had him fired. In reality, all land dwelling vertebrates are imperfect, modified fishes; just barely getting by with limbs that are merely refashioned fins, lungs that are inverted gills.
And the gravity! Without the support of the dense seawater, the gravity pulls on me like — but before this becomes a tedious list of pathological complaints from an old fart, we must acknowledge the spiritual loss due to our emigration from the ocean. Who doesn't feel that they are missing out on something terribly special when they gaze down into the kaleidoscopic world of the deep? The corals, the mollusks, in the oceanic world, even the algae*** are vibrant and beautiful. On land we are stuck with a dull, dichromatic palette of muddy browns and greens with only rare glimpses of real colour and its effect on the soul is draining. I am certainly an appreciator of all facets of the natural world, but nothing on the land can possibly compare to the sheer otherworldliness and majesty of the undersea realm.
Well, tides go out and tides come in again. Other members of our mammalian tribe such as the whales, dolphins, seals and sea lions, dugongs and manatees returned to sea; why not us? Perhaps the future direction of humanity’s ongoing evolution is a homecoming to the environment that we so unwisely spurned around 370 million years ago. The terrestrial experiment has been successful in many pragmatic ways, but we are metaphysically poorer for it.
- Felix Ookean, Cairns, December 1981.
* Although the invertebrates had us beat onto the land by over 50 million years! A hollow victory if ever there was one.
** I, in particular may be thought of as having a personal stake in this as my family name, you may have guessed, translates as ‘ocean’ in my father’s native Estonian tongue.
*** In fact, the colouration of our oceanic algae is so distinctive, that many major divisions within the group were originally elucidated on the basis of these characteristics. Every layman has heard of blue-green algae (Cyanobacteria), but it is worth exploring all the families in their variously hued glory; Chlorophyta (green algae), Rhodophyta (red algae), Phaeophyceae (brown algae), Chrysophyceae (golden-brown algae) and Xanthophyceae (yellow-green algae).
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