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After introducing the concept of the birthing pool in the 1970s, Michel Odent has continuously expanded his interest in the mysterious connections between humans and water. In Planet Ocean he shows that the evolution of the oceans – particularly the fluctuations of sea levels – and the evolution of humans are inseparable. The oceans are the givers and sustainers of life, holding ninety-five per cent of the planet's habitable space within their immense depths. Odent steers us towards a radically new vision of human nature. Our defining feature – a supersized brain – becomes a leitmotif that enables links between topics as diverse as our nutritional needs, our relationship with sea mammals, and the way members of our species give birth. He relates 'transcendent emotional states' with what the French writer Romain Rolland referred to as 'the oceanic feeling' – both suggesting the absence of limits. Access to such states can be associated with, for example, a 'foetus ejection reflex'. This leads to the extraordinary conclusion that swimming – as learnt behaviour among humans – the birth process and access to transcendence are interrelated topics for students of human nature. Planet Ocean is a fascinating interdisciplinary study that demonstrates our manifold connections to water and suggests their relevance to everyday life.
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PLANET OCEAN
Our Mysterious Connections to Water
MICHEL ODENT
Clairview Books Ltd.
Russet, Sandy Lane,
West Hoathly,
W. Sussex RH19 4QQ
www.clairviewbooks.com
Published by Clairview Books 2021
© Michel Odent 2021
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrical, chemical, mechanical, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. Inquiries should be addressed to the Publishers
The right of Michel Odent to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 912992 27 0 EISBN 978 1 912992 31 7
Cover by Morgan Creative
Typeset by Symbiosys Technologies, Vishakapatnam, India
Printed and bound by 4Edge Ltd, Essex
Abstracts
1.Mysteries
2.Fluctuations of sea levels
3.Homo navigator
4.Looking towards the future?
5.Homo’s best friends
6.The super brainy mammals: Homo and Tucuxi
7.From Aesop to Elaine Morgan: What pioneers have in common
8.Straight to the point
9.The mammal that cannot swim
10.Why is human birth occasionally easy?
11.The Oceanic feeling
12.Humanity and Mother Ocean
13.From a garden paddling pool to the Pacific Ocean
Notes and References
Index
The objective of this preliminary chapter is to provide reasons to identify and interpret mysterious human characteristics. We refer to modern life and also to prehistory, history, myths, legends and arts as diverse as poetry, sculpture, painting, songs and cinema. We wonder why the small groups of scientists who raised questions about the dozens of traits humans share with sea mammals, but not with other primates, have been marginalized.
Measurable criteria
Palaeomicrobiology
The prototype of a modern interdisciplinary scholar
We present the evolution of our planet and the evolution of Homo as two inseparable topics. That is why we find it necessary to recall, in particular, that during a period covering the last two million years sea levels have fluctuated some 218 metres.
An estimated 20 million km2 of territory was exposed on the world’s continental shelves between 110,000 and 10,000 years before the present. Exploitation of marine resources has undoubtedly created the potential for relatively high human population densities. During this period, some of the major phases of human history have taken place, including renewed human dispersals out of Africa.
Such facts suggest that until now paleoanthropologists might have studied marginalized human populations that colonized inland territories, probably after migrations along rivers and around lakes.
The Mediterranean Basin
Questions from Gibraltar
The Pacific Rim
From Madagascar to Easter Island
There are countless published documents about the palaeolithic hunter-gatherers. The time has come to realize that ‘Planet Ocean’ has been to a great extent colonized by ‘Homo Navigator’. We focus on the Mediterranean Basin and the Pacific Rim.
By raising questions about this little-known variety of prehistoric Homo, we take another look at human nature.
Limited perspectives
A unique dominant status
Why the Americas before Madagascar?
Underwater fossil hunting
As interdisciplinary students in human nature, we are combining records of the past in order to look towards the future.
Each perspective is in the hand of specialized researchers and has limited objectives.
Fossil hunting (palaeoanthropology) has narrow limits: when human fossils are found it means first that the geological and environmental conditions are absolutely exceptional. The advent of valuable fossil-dating methods has enlarged its power.
Archaeology, which looks at physical objects shaped by human contact, also has obvious narrow limits.
Today human evolutionary genetics has reached a unique dominant status. It is established that since the glacial maximum, a landmass the size of South America has been inundated worldwide. On the day when this piece of information becomes common knowledge, underwater fossil hunting (i.e., underwater palaeoanthropol-ogy) might become an irreplaceable complementary key to studying human nature.
The dolphin connection
The canine connection
How to interpret the deep-rooted mysterious connections between Homo and dolphins, on the one hand, and Homo and dogs, on the other hand.
Nutritional needs
The dolphin family
Too rational to survive
Questions about common points, advantages and handicaps of mammals endowed with a supersized brain inspire joint studies of Homo and members of the dolphin family. The focus should be on nutritional needs and enzymatic systems.
The pioneers who focused on various human characteristics suggestive of an aquatic past had several common points. One of them leads to observe that interdisciplinarity, as the capacity to focus on links between seemingly different areas, is a facet of lateral thinking.
It should be enough
It is not enough
One step further
The defining feature of Homo is a supersized brain. From this perspective, human beings have more similarities with sea mammals than with land mammals in general and the other apes in particular. As a general rule, when a trait is mysterious, and apparently specific to humans, there are reasons to look at what we have in common with mammals adapted to the sea.
In the age of genetics, we suggest that the best way to challenge the dominant theories and to go one step further is to restart from the central event that separated the emerging Homo from Pan (the chimpanzees). We now have reasons to suggest that this event is at the root of the defining feature of Homo.
Learning from babies
Learning from non-human apes
From Plato to the next Olympic Games
Breaststroke versus front crawl: the realm of mysteries
Advantages of learned behaviours
Humans are the mammals that need to learn a technique to be able to swim. They lose their innate capacity to swim when they reach a certain degree of neocortical maturity that takes place around the age of three or four months.
The great diversity of styles confirms that, beyond a certain degree of brain development, swimming must be classified among learned behaviours: it occurs only after experience or practice. A learned behaviour is an advantage in terms of adaptability: it is flexible.
When the tool becomes the master
The solution found by nature
The foetus ejection reflex
Challenging thousands of years of tradition
Until now, studies of birth physiology among humans were based on interpretations of difficulties. This is why the comparative importance of mechanical factors has been overestimated by theoreticians. We should first interpret the well-known fact that, occasionally, women who are not special from a morphological perspective can give birth easily and quickly, while others need medical intervention after days of hard labour. This enormous discrepancy leads us to understand that birth physiology is first and foremost a chapter of brain physiology. It is essential to realize that the part of the brain that has reached an extremely high level of development in our species—the ‘new brain’ or neocortex—does not always play the role of a tool at the service of vital physiological functions. On the contrary, in some particular situations, it can inhibit and weaken such functions. It is as if the tool may become the master. The main objective of this chapter is to popularize the concept of neocortical inhibition. Reduced self-control, as an effect of a reduced neocortical activity, appears as the main factor that makes human birth possible. When this solution found by nature is understood, it becomes easy to analyze and summarize the basic needs of a labouring woman: she needs to feel protected against all possible neocortical stimulations. The keyword is protection. The main stimulants of neocortical activity are well-known: language, light and all attention-enhancing situations.
The highways to transcendence
Half-open doors to transcendence
During transcendent emotional states, human beings can escape from space and time reality. Episodes of human reproductive life such as the ‘foetus ejection reflex’, the ‘milk ejection reflex’ and the ‘sperm ejection reflex’ are presented as ‘the highways to transcendence’. Enthusiasm and joy are considered in this framework.
From Green to Blue
Disclosing priorities
Beyond the explicit messages
Modern humans must urgently realize that 95 per cent of the planet’s habitable space lies within the deep immense oceans: the oceans may be presented as the givers and sustainers of life. In such a context we rephrase a common question: how can humanity develop its respect for ‘Mother Ocean’?
Jumping from one scale to another
In the age of tap water
Before the age of tap water
Homo—the primate endowed with a powerful neocortical supercomputer—has an immense capacity to jump from one order of magnitude to another. I illustrate this capacity in the framework of the relationship between Homo and water.
In 1934, while my family was living in a village in Northern France, we got a car. The following Sunday, we went to the seashore by the Channel. A dream had come true!
In 1936, a paid vacation policy was set by a new French government. Millions of people went to the beach and spent days watching the waves, gazing at the horizon … and dreaming. This was an inspiration for my mother as a poet. The first verse of her poem in alexandrine titled ‘Vers ton île’ (Towards Your Island) was a question:
‘Qui donc m’emportera vers ton île lointaine?’
(Who will take me to your distant island?)
The French navigator Jacques Cousteau was curious about his own mysterious vocation, confessing that he did not know why he loved the sea.
Once I was in a shop in Tokyo. There was a musical background. We could hear ‘La Mer’, by Charles Trenet. A poemsong about the sea makes people dream all over the world.