Elaine Morgan > Quotes

“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.”
― Elaine Morgan, The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis

“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.”
― Elaine Morgan, The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis

“Whales and dolphins have been aquatic for about 70 million years and seals for between 25 and 30 million years.”
― Elaine Morgan, The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis

“The trouble with specialists is that they tend to think in grooves. From time to time something happens to shake them out of that groove.”
― Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman

“Homo sapiens is a creature that over vast areas of the earth, in the countries and continents and centuries that the history books and the newsreels neglect because nothing ‘interesting’ has happened in them, has succeeded in living the moderate and mainly cooperative life to be expected of cousins of the hedonic apes. Almost all men spend most of their lives in this way. Most men spend all their lives in this way.
But 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.”
― Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman: The Classic Study of Evolution

“The hypothetical aquatic phase of the ancestral apes during the fossil gap would have been brief, a matter of two or three million years.”
― Elaine Morgan, The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis

“What it adds up to is that, with the advent of the pill, woman is beginning to get her finger on the genetic trigger. What she will do with it we cannot quite foresee. But it is a far cry from the bull who gets to be prolific just because he's tops at beating the daylights out all the other bulls. It may be that for homo sapiens in the future, extreme manifestations of the behaviour patterns of dominance and aggression will be evolutionary at a discount; and if that happens he will begin to shed them as once, long ago, he shed his coat of fur.”
― Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman: The Classic Study of Evolution

“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. There is a line in an old folk song that runs: ’I called my donkey a horse gone wonky.’ Throughout most of the”
― Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman

“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. There is a line in an old folk song that runs: ’I called my donkey a”
― Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman

“as a copy she was not a very good copy. There were differences. She was not one of His best efforts. There is a line in an old folk song that runs: ’I called my donkey”
― Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman

“Hacen falta dos para bailar, y hacen falta dos para convertir a una mujer en objeto sexual.”
― Elaine Morgan