The fossil record does not support the aquatic ape hypothesis.
The fossil record doesn't support most individual species, let alone one as recent as ours.
We need to develop genetic sciences to look for patterns in evolution as well.That stuff is fascinating. The protein I study has been around for 2.1 billion years (since the first eukaryotes), we know this because it is present in yeast, plants, protozoa, animals, etc. Its original purpose seems to be stabilizing folds in cell membranes. If you trace back the history it looks like around 500 mya the gene got quadrupled in the early vertebrates, then around 450 mya, a transposon (like parasitic DNA) happened to cut out some of a sequence from a connective tissue gene and put it in the middle of this ones sequence. At the same time many other genes were also being mutated this way. Soon after this we see adaptive immune systems (antibodies, T-cells, etc) first appear, along with jaws, and increased brain size. Then an additional sequence got inserted at the beginning of one of the 4 copies sometime after primates split from rodents (100 mya). Now humans are trying to deactivate it in people with brain or spinal cord damage, since it stabilizes neural circuits...which is usually a good thing, but not so much in the context of brain damage. Nature didn't plan for a species to have the technology to keep alive so long after sustaining such injuries. So the theory is deactivation could kind of returns the brain to a younger, more plastic state thus allowing it to route around the damage.
The coolest part is you can double check all this yourself for free, or even do your own research, using
BLAST.
