For most of us being in water feels great. I grew up jumping off cliffs at Cala’n Brut, near Ciutadella. Humans are adapted to spending time in water: our lungs, hearts and sensors around our mouths are all prepared. We can hold our breaths and havewebbed palms. The Aquatic Ape Theory suggests our ancestors climbed down from trees and got straight into the sea to forage. Instead of running across the Serengeti to hunt. This could explain our sense of deep calm and belonging in water.
The sea around Menorca is nutrient, and therefore algae poor. This is what makes the water so clear. The red rocks, yellow sands and green seagrass stand out vivid and powerful when snorkelling. Topside, when the Sun is low in the sky, its light reflects across the water in a shimmery pillar called a “Glitter Path”. On a recent camping trip, I watched the Moon make a haunting one over the Illa den Tosqueta. A still night. A balm for the soul. And yet living in Menorca, I ended up taking it for granted, this healing force available on the doorstep all year round.
According to Professor Luigi Odone, a clinical psychologist from Genova University, submerging our bodies in water returns our psyche to the feelings of quietness, peace and security we felt in the womb. Yet, while our minds are drawn to water for relaxation, our bodies also share physical adaptations to submersion with aquatic mammals.
The Mammalian dive reflex is brought on by putting our faces in water. The heartbeat and metabolism slow down, peripheral blood vessels constrict to concentrate blood in the vital organs, blood pressure drops and muscles relax. These are all adaptations to preserve oxygen, and thus life, just like diving porpoises, sea lions and killer whales. Because water stimulates skin sensors around our mouths to kick in the reflex, it’s much harder to hold our breath on land than in water – don’t try this at home.
Like seals, humans also undergo a “blood shift”; where blood, as an incompressible liquid, is shunted to our lungs to offset the increasing pressure during a dive. This means that our lungs can be compressed on dives to over 100m without imploding, as they would do if they were filled with air alone. Like the unfortunate vessel Titan.
Interestingly, we may well have evolved in water, a lot more recently than previously thought. Alistair Morgan was watching whales being butchered in the Antarctic in the ‘20s when it first dawned on him that humans had blubber too. Thus, he developed his Aquatic Ape theory. He proposed that between 9 and 3.5 million years ago, hominids in the northeast of Africa, then underwater, went into the sea to gather mussels and clams. Spending up to 6 hours a day foraging, with water holding our bodies vertical, we gradually evolved to stand on two legs.
Humans are most different to the rest of primates. Unlike scrawny ape infants, our babies are too fat to have hung around their naked mother’s necks while she dangled from a tree. Plus, furless, they wouldn’t have had much to hold onto. Rather, blubber-coated human babies are buoyant and insulated for life in water. When born they float like dolphin calves. Top tip: a separate study showed that water-born babies were more optimistic at the age of 10 than those who had a traditional land-based birth.
Alistair thought the hair we did retain on our heads could be an anchor for floating infants to grab onto while their mother collected sea cucumbers, clasping them between her big toe. Always the more fortunate of the sexes, pregnant women actually grow more and thicker hair, whilst men are more likely to go bald.
Even as adults, subcutaneous fat rounds off our bodies – streamlining us for swimming. Handy excuse! Our long noses prevent water from getting up our nostrils when diving. The theory likens our dextrous hands to those of raccoons that also forage by streams. The list of human oddities when compared to the rest of primates is endless: gruesomely, humans don’t eat placentas – because they would have sunk away from predators anyway. We cry, like distressed mother seals when separated from their young. And we are the only ones to have webbing between our thumb and forefinger.
They say that if you throw a baby in a pool before the age of six months it will know how to swim. My baby cousin Adam fell in the water and he instinctively knew to shut his mouth. His big blue eyes smiled back at me as he lay on his on his back under water, mouth tight shut and looking quite at home. I fished him out and he didn’t even cry. Homo aquaticus indeed.
People have sent the sick to the coast to cure illness for centuries, whether it be consumption, eczema or asthma. Human blood and seawater are made of the same stuff: our plasma contains a high concentration of salts, chlorine and trace elements vital for our health. It’s said we imbibe these from seawater through our skin while swimming, redressing our biochemical balance. To prove the similarities, a French scientist conducted an experiment in the early 1900s to replace his dog’s blood with seawater – and it lived. https://oceanrescuespa.com/ pages/body-ocean-relationship.
So maybe all this explains why we need the sea, to be able to hear and smell it. Why we feel unwell when away from it, and seek it out to heal us in times of need? Fortunately for most Menorcans, the glittery clear sea is but a short walk from our homes. We try to do a “calada”- or a quick splash during our lunch breaks – as often as possible. Even when the tourist masses push us out of our beaches, we meet on the rocks in the evening for a beer and a plunge. Heaven…
Rachael Adams is a freelance environmental journalist. Read more of her articles at https://rachaeladamsblog.live/
