There are only two types of animals — those which can swim and those which cannot. Why are humans the only creature that has the optional swimming feature they can turn on?
In: Biology
over time, as the population has grown and cities have emerged. a lot of people do not have to deal with a river/ocean etc. if you do not encounter water in your everyday life, you lose the skill and or learn the skill of survival.
just as I don’t know how to hunt and gather in the traditional sense, because my survival does not depend on it, not swimming is not longer required to survive
Humans are born being able to swim. If you throw a newborn into water or, more commonly, if they’re born submerged in water they will swim. It’s just that humans’ culture is so “civilized” that the vast majority of us then forget how to swim in the process of learning how to walk and talk and draw with crayons and cut with scissors and all the unnatural things we all do all the time – so we have to re-learn how to swim at some point.
Apes can’t innately swim either. We walk upright, an animal that walks on all fours has an easier transition to swimming because their body is already in an optimal position for keeping their head above water while paddling
Probably has something to do with being apes. No other ape can swim, so it would stand to reason that we naturally can’t. However, other animals that can’t swim don’t have the intelligence or social support to learn something that presents a high risk of death.
River otters (and possibly other types?) also have to [be taught how to swim](https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/s/j2Ajc9Hhxr) so it’s not purely a human thing.
I don’t know if kangaroos need to learn to swim, but when they do swim, it is about the only time they move their legs independently of each other. Sorry, only mildly related, but I think it is an interesting fact.
It’s possible that many animals could swim but cannot produce environments to learn without dying before they master it.
Babies need to learn to walk, it’s a month-long process during which they fall a lot and where parents need to be cautious depending on the kid’s temperament. In the worst cases, trial and error leads to minor injuries. Learning to swim on the other hand require a whole lot more logistics otherwise the consequence is simply drowning. It took my youngest kid about 2 months from standing and doing a couple of steps, to being able to walk around on most easy terrain. That’s with access to walking surface pretty much all day, and he really only cared about walking and would practice constantly. It’s a lot more difficult to provide safe swimming practice, so it’s learned later, when lots of fears have been learned and many natural instincts have been lost.
Why do humans have to “learn” to walk and crawl? Most mammals are born knowing how to walk, and if they aren’t on their feet right after birth, the usually manage it within a few weeks. Humans rarely walk before a year.
It would seem that humans differ in a number of ways.
Bipedalism means that even the most basic physical skills have to be learnt. There is nothing Balance must be developed before we can even walk, for example. Walking on two legs does not come naturally.
Big brains mean that we are not bound by the natural limitations of our bodies. We are capable of developing techniques to overcome them. These are obviously not innate and have to be learnt
I don’t think this is very true. Dogs, cats, and a lot of other land animals are able to swim. Most of them suck at it compared to animals that live in the water.
Humans don’t have an “optional swimming feature”. We instinctively know how to do a very laborious paddle. When people “learn to swim” it has to do with training them to be better at it. For example, the body is (usually) naturally buoyant, but if you position yourself certain ways in water you still sink. So you learn things like how to float on your back or how to do a backstroke, which is extremely low-energy. Then you learn specific strokes that help you move faster or use less energy. But a completely untrained person is pretty likely to exhaust themselves and drown in a very short time, mostly because biologically speaking we’re not made to live in water so what instincts we have aren’t devoted to efficient swimming.
It’s no more “an optional swimming feature” as we have “an optional driving a car feature”. Our hands and feet and limbs give us a wide range of mobility and we have really good motor control. A lot of other animals are similar and can learn to do weirdo human things. For example, some dogs can skateboard. They weren’t born knowing how to skateboard. They watched people do it and we’ve bred them to try and mimic what humans do. They did it and the humans laughed. We’ve bred them to want to make humans pleased so they learned this was a good thing they should do more.
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