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This Footage Proves Humans Aren't the Only Sea-Worthy Primates

Monkey swim? Some apes do! So much for that Aquatic Ape theory.

There are many wonderful activities that humans enjoy that our simian cousins don’t—forming rock bands, building air conditioners, the Mario Party series, just to name a few. But a husband-and-wife research team has found that swimming is no longer an only-human hobby. They’ve found chimpanzees and an orangutan, raised in captivity, who are diving and doing the ape stroke.

Although most mammals swim, conventional wisdom has held that extant hominoids—including chimps, gibbons, gorillas, orangutans and bonobos—are unable to cross deep water. On this branch of our evolutionary tree, only humans swim, and even then, not all of us.

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Some have taken this fact and formed the dubious “Aquatic Ape Theory,” which states that humans took to the flooded forests and that’s why humans started walking upright and why we’re so much less hairy than our closest relatives. There just isn’t much support for this theory, which is why Nicole and Renato Bender make it a point to distance themselves from it on their website, swimmingapes.com.

“These hypotheses have not been accepted within the paleoanthropological community as valid scenarios for early hominin evolution,” the website states. “The emotional discussion surrounding the aquatic hypotheses had a negative influence for decades on how researchers approached the topic of primates’ interaction with water.”

Not to be deterred by “the emotional discussion,” the Benders have published a paper in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, which finds that apes can swim, they’re just not built for it.

“We suggest that apes' poor swimming ability is due to behavioral, anatomical, and neuromotor changes related to an adaptation to arboreal life in their early phylogeny. This strong adaptive focus on arboreal life led to decreased opportunities to interact with water bodies and consequently to a reduction of selective pressure to maintain innate swimming behavior”

But the chimp in the short video above, Cooper, was raised in Missouri and is both the Michael Phelps AND Greg Louganis of chimpanzees. And when he holds his hand in front of his eyes when he dives, it’s pretty adorable.

The swimming orangutan, named Suryia, lives in a private zoo in South Carolina and seems much more adept. At any rate, the footage is much better.

They both swim in different, learned ways, which is interesting and holds promise that there may be some sort of ape-winning-the-gold-medal in the 200 meter freestyle feel-good movie to look forward to in the near future–Dunston Checks Into the Olympics, perhaps.