Splash!

10,000 Years of Swimming

Howard Means

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781911630838
• eBook ISBN:
  9781760874292
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

'This fascinating history of how, where and why humans swim...is perfect reading for those missing a splash-about during the lockdown.' Guardian From the first recorded dip into what's now the driest spot on earth to the recreational swimmers in your local pool, humans have been getting wet for 10, 000 years. And for most of modern history, swimming has caused a ripple that touches us all. Splash! dives into Egypt, winds through ancient Greece and Rome, flows mostly underground through the Dark and Middle Ages (at least in Europe), and then re-emerges in the wake of the Renaissance before taking its final lap at the modern Olympic Games. Along the way, it kicks away the idea that swimming is just about speed or great feats of aquatic endurance, revealing how its history spans religion, fashion, architecture, public health, colonialism, segregation, sexism, sexiness, guts, glory and much, much more. As refreshing as jumping into a pool on a hot summer's day, Splash! sweeps across the whole of humankind's swimming history with an irrepressible enthusiasm that will make you crave your next dip.

1

GODS, HUMANS, AND THE AQUATIC APE

Over 380 million years ago, the basic form of our limbs was already in place, albeit in fish which swam through the Devonian sea.

—Brian Switek

Creationists and evolutionists agree on at least one thing: life began with water.

In the opening lines of the Book of Genesis, God creates an Earth without form and void, an Earth on which darkness is upon the face of the deep. Then in verse 2, less than thirty words into the six-hundred-thousand-word Old Testament, God’s Spirit moves upon the water, and the fine work of creation begins. God separates light from darkness. He divides the waters under the firmament from those above it—the oceans from Heaven. Dry land appears, vegetation, the sun and the moon, creatures of the deep, fowl of every kind, and beasts as well, four-legged ones and creeping things. Then on Day Six, God creates his masterwork—humankind in his own image—and on the Seventh Day he rests.

Evolution gets us to the same place but takes four billion-plus years longer. The one-cell creatures of that first, all-encompassing deep grow to two cells, eight cells, complicated fish with gills capable of taking oxygen out of H₂O, and on from there. Eventually, air breathers struggle ashore, get a foothold on the land, and finally half a million years or so ago, Homo sapiens—our long-distant ancestors—begin to leave their first footprints.

Either way, in creationism’s fast lane or along the scenic route of evolution, water is central to the story. It’s where life first formed, and maybe where life as far we can imagine it will end. (See Kevin Costner’s Water-world, Steven Spielberg’s A.I., global warming, and more.) Even today, we humans are aquatic mammals until virtually the moment of our birth. Our first breath out of the womb can’t be that different from the one taken by the first proto-us who stumbled or more likely finned themselves ashore—pure surprise!

Although we are eons to the hundredth power removed from those first fish that crawled or flopped or pushed themselves out of the sea, we still bear some striking anatomical resemblances to them and their immediate ancestors. The fish genus known as Tinirau dates back at least 375 million years. Tinirau never left the ocean, but in an evolutionary sense, it clearly was preparing to. Instead of the sort of fins any fisherman would recognize—fans of thin bones, often spikey at the tip—Tinirau’s four fins were each attached to its body by a single bone, just as our arms are attached to our bodies by the humerus and our legs by the femur. Today’s “walking catfish” of South Florida are closer to chunky snakes— they wriggle their way forward. The Tinirau heralded the dawn of tetra-pods—four-footed creatures, just like us before standing up caught on.

As Brian Switek wrote back in 2012 for Wired.com, “Over 380 million years ago, the basic form of our limbs was already in place, albeit in fish which swam through the Devonian sea.” Something to think about! The fish–human comparisons don’t end there. Swimming also remains deeply encoded in our biology. Full or even partial submersion triggers a whole suite of involuntary responses that would seem far more helpful to animals that lived in the water than to those that walk on dry land.

Spend an hour up to your head in water heated to 32 degrees Centigrade (almost 90 degrees Fahrenheit), and your heart rate will drop on average by 15 percent, and systolic and diastolic blood pressure by 11 and 12 percent, respectively. Knock the temperature down 10 percent or more (toward the range that competitive swimmers prefer) and the benefits in cardiopulmonary efficiency are greater still. A study in the International Journal of Circumpolar Health found that “winter swimming” (and remember, we’re talking “circumpolar” here) reduces tension, fatigue, and negativity while boosting vigor and relieving pain from multiple conditions including rheumatism, fibromyalgia, and asthma. No wonder whales often seem more at peace with themselves than we humans do.

One more piece of evidence reinforces that there’s something genetically aquatic about us humans: the mammalian diving reflex. Plunge into cold water, and three things happen automatically:

• Your heart rate slows by up to 30 percent, or 50 percent or more in trained individuals. (The triggers here are the trigeminal facial nerves, which run on either side of the nose, and the vagus nerve, which connects brain, heart, lungs, and digestive tract.)

• As that happens, muscle contractions in blood vessel walls reduce blood flow to the extremities, preserving blood (and critically the oxygen it carries) for the core organs—your brain and heart.

• Continue descending below the surface, and you trigger a third phenomenon: blood plasma and water fill your chest cavity to protect the critical organs there—lungs and heart—from the increased external water pressure.

Granted, other than pearl hunters, maybe Navy SEALs, and socalled free divers, no part of this reflex is broadly useful for humans.^* The water has to be 70 degrees Fahrenheit or colder to trigger the diving reflex, an uncomfortable temperature for most of us. What’s more, humans simply aren’t made to swim with the ease, strength, or power of the mammals most dependent on the diving reflex—whales, seals, otters, porpoises, and the like. But that such a reflex exists at all surely suggests our watery past.

One variant of the reflex provides an important safeguard for human newborns. Submerge an infant up to the age of about six months in water, and his or her windpipe automatically closes to keep water out of the lungs—the secret behind “water-baby” classes and the like taught at so many YMCAs.

And then there’s sound. Out of the water, sounds travels through air to our inner ear, where it is detected and sent to the brain for translation. But as Helen Czerski points out in a fascinating “Everyday Physics” piece for the Wall Street Journal, below the water line, the outer ear is blocked by water. Instead, sound waves reach the inner ear through what’s known as “bone conduction”—that is, by traveling through the jaw bone and skull. One result is that we hear high-pitched sounds and sharp ones like tapping and clicking—exactly the kind of “language” that whales, porpoises, and other large aquatic mammals use—far better underwater than we do above. Maybe our underwater ears were made to hear them, and we just forgot what all those sounds mean.

Combine the embedded human water responses described above with Darwin’s theory of evolution, and it can be tempting to arrive at the aquatic ape theory. Back in 1960, British biologist Sir Alister Hardy posited that humans first began to differentiate themselves from other apes when they climbed down from the trees and set up house beside the sea and other large bodies of water. Academically, that was a big leap. Conventional wisdom held that those first proto-humans set out as hunter-gatherers across the grasslands rather than heading for the beach. But, at another level, Hardy’s theory was nothing more than common sense.

Up until about age six months, an infant’s windpipe automatically closes underwater, an indication perhaps of our aquatic heritage. (Affebook, altered to black & white)

Mastering rivers, deltas, and coastal waters would have extended the range of those first human-apes, broadened their diet to include the roots and tubers of water lilies and the like, and critically forced them into an upright stance so they could wade through the water with their heads held high and hands free to forage. Adding swimming and diving to the skill set—not just entering the water but also, in a sense, conquering it— would have yielded even greater rewards: access to protein- and omega-3-rich food sources such as fish, shellfish, and kelp—a banquet less subject to seasonal variations than nuts or berries or migrating land animals.

From that premise, other ape–human differentiations appear to fall more or less naturally in place. Proto-humans began to shed their fur, replacing it with subcutaneous fat, both to keep themselves warm when foraging in colder waters and icy weather and to protect their young. Just as their windpipes naturally close when submerged—and for the same reason: air trapped in their lungs—newborn humans naturally float. No other ape-descended newborn can claim that.

Grasslands or wetlands? Big-game savannah hunters or waterside foragers? That’s basically where the controversy stood in 1972 when Elaine Morgan tossed a feminist grenade into the mix with her book The Descent of Woman. Morgan had no problem with Alister Hardy’s theory—in fact, she thoroughly embraced it—but Hardy hadn’t pursued his own logic deeply enough. The grasslands theory had always favored men. They were the strong ones. They led the hunt and developed big brains to coordinate the kill. The women followed along, cooked the meat, serviced the hunters, had their babies, and on life went, killing and rutting.

Hardy’s aquatic ape opened up for Elaine Morgan a whole new world of reasoning. If women weren’t leading the water foraging in those proto-human societies, why did they develop thicker layers of subcutaneous fat than men? And why is it that, even today, the only sport in which women are clearly superior to men is long-distance (as in, very long distance) open-water swimming? Michael Phelps might have a chest full of Olympic gold medals, but Lynne Cox has swum the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia, in water that averaged 43 degrees Fahrenheit. Which is the greater accomplishment? Well, it depends on what you set out to do.

Alister Hardy’s aquatic ape theory—and Elaine Morgan’s feminist take on it—still struggles for traction in the academic world, but swimming’s role in evolution seems beyond dispute. At the simplest level, a high comfort level with water might be a key discriminator between which strains of early hominoids survived the massive climate shifts of prehistory and which didn’t. Seas rose. Oceans flooded. A bolt of lightning could turn hundreds of miles of sere grasslands into a raging wall of flame. At such tipping points, those who didn’t fear water could take to the sea in rafts in search of more hospitable living circumstances, while those who feared water stayed put and perished.

By the eighteenth century BCE, when Hammurabi put together his famous code of laws, swimming had become in an odd way a key element of an entire judicial system. Hammurabi’s code is an astoundingly thorough document. For adultery alone, it makes nine distinctions and provides as many separate legal remedies, many of them more women-centered than Hester Prynne encountered in Salem, Massachusetts, in the late seventeenth century CE. Three of the strictures, though, do seem both primitive and punitive:

• If a wife of a man be taken in lying with another man, they shall bind them and throw them into the water.

• If the finger have been pointed at the wife of a man because of another man, and she have not been taken in lying with another man, for her husband’s sake she shall throw herself into the river.

• If that woman do not protect her body and enter into another house, they shall call that woman to account and they shall throw her into the water.

Even in these cases, though, swimming provides an out. In the first instance, a repentant husband is allowed to jump into the water and rescue his accused wife. In the second and third, where the woman is unbound, her fate is presumably up to the river gods. If she’s innocent, they will rescue her. If not, goodbye. On the other hand, if the accused already knows some rudimentary swimming skills, why not fake it and let the gods take credit?

An even more dramatic example of swimming’s utility four thousand years ago can be found in the second of Hammurabi’s 282 laws:

If anyone bring an accusation against a man and the accused go to the river and leap into the river, if he sink in the river his accuser shall take possession of his house. But if the river proves that accused is not guilty and he escapes unhurt, then he who hath brought the allegation shall be put to death, while he who leaped into the river shal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue: Once Upon a Time in Egypt . . .
• 1 Gods, Humans, and the Aquatic Ape
• 2 Swimming’s Golden Age
• 3 First There Was Swimming; Then There Was None
• 4 Rediscovering a Lost Art
• 5 Swimming 2.0
• 6 A Frog in Every Tub
• 7 Diving in for Dollars and Pounds
• 8 Climb Every Mountain, Swim Every Sea
• 9 The Great Swimming Cover-Up
• 10 An Aussie Wrecking Ball Goes Rogue
• 11 Nylon, WWII, James Bond, and the G-String
• 12 Swimming Together, Swimming Alone
• 13 The Last Taboo
• 14 Growing Pains
• 15 The Fastest Swimmer Ever
• 16 Is Enough Ever Enough?
• Epilogue: My Watery Life
• Acknowledgments
• Sources
• Index