Mammals of the Ocean: The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis Set to Music

This is a song written and sung by T.H. Culhane when he was a science and multi-media teacher at Jefferson High School in South Central Los Angeles. It was produced and recorded with Byron DeLear at Ogden House Studios in Hollywood around 1995. David Grober, president of Motion Picture Marine, is also in the recording and took DeLear and Culhane and his students from the D.E.M.M.O. Productions program on the Motion Picture Marine Boat into the Ocean to video tape marine mammals and expose the inner city students to the marine environment for the first time. Unfortunately we don't have any of that early footage. Now T.H. brings his melodic-mnemonics songs around the world (Palestine and Israel are featured here) and teaches students the lessons by having them illustrate the lyrics with web images that they select. The first step is to create what is essentially a powerpoint presentation or video slide show of relevant images. The process of selecting and assembling the images reinforces the concepts and vocabulary. Different student teams will create different takes on the same songs. Advanced students continue by writing their own environmental songs in their own languages and illustrating with their own images and footage.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Aquatic Ape Hypothesis
• Elaine Morgan
• Descent of Woman
• Descent of Man
• Evolution
• Natural Selection
• Melodic-Mnemonics
• T.H. Culhane
• Solarl CITIES
• marine mammals
• dolphins
• whales
• sea lions
• dugong
• manatee
• little mermaid
• atlantis
• creation

[tculhane]

Type "Elaine Morgan" and "TED conference" into google and you can check out a great explaination of the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis that this song is about!

[AlgisKuliukas]

... or whatever the hell it is that stands for orthodoxy today, Last I heard it went something like this... "don't ask, it's not a scientific question." Brilliant. It's not the "aquatic ape" theory - there are more than one. They should be called "waterside hypotheses of human evolution" because they suggest some selection from wading, swimming and diving has made us so different from the other apes - not that we became aquatic as implied by your parody.

[AlgisKuliukas]

Nice production. Good work. But was it really necessary to distort the idea quite so much? As "Gib" mentions, I'm not very important, but I am happy to discuss this idea with anyone - even those who just want to take the piss out it (that's pretty much everyone on TalkRational then). Maybe next time you might take the piss out of the savannah theory or the woodland theory or the super generalist theory or the sudden mutation theory or the random drift theory or the God knows theory?

[jointgib]

Aquatic ape proponents will be pleased to know that the Aquatic Ape Theory's tenth most important proponent, Algis Kuliukas, is available for discussion on a daily basis in his own Waterside Hypotheses of Human Evolution thread in the Evolution & Origins forum at Talk Rational.org

[iamkylerr]

Okay so the guys got a GENIUS idea. It was kind of weird I stumbled upon this by googling "the five senses" and I was thinking about how the best way to teach people is through audio/visual. But there's a downside, the songs suck... the info needs to be individualized into different genres by actual musical artist. Think about how fucking excited a kid would be to learn by their favorite artist/the style their favorite artist perform in? Just think about it.