Can you remember when you learned to swim? I was too young, but I'm sure I wasn't an infant. I've seen shows demonstrating that babies can learn. I've never known anyone, thank God, who lost a child to drowning. It was bad enough that a young school friend lost her dog that way during the family dinner, an experience that's always made me teach young dogs where the steps in the pool were, on those rare occasions when any of my dogs have encountered a pool.
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My mother had a deep-set fear that I would drown, so she put me in swimming lessons at birth. I've always known how to swim, although I can still remember swimming lessons, because they went on until I was 12 or 13 -- old enough for lifeguard training.
As a consequence, maybe, I've never drowned. :)
There was a book I read once that postulated that modern humans were actually evolved from a sort of aquatic ape--one that spent a lot of time in the water. Not quite seals, but you get the idea.
Various points of human physiology supposedly support this, from the general lack of fur to the way fat is distributed on the body.
I don't know if the theory still is in general circulation or not.
I remember learning something like that in HS, Eric.
But then back in the day when I had my babies, the current fad was teaching infants to swim. What goes around, comes around :)
When we were stationed in Yuma there was a young Natty Guard couple who would bring their 6 mo. old daughter to the pool. The mother said that she'd put the girl in the pool the first week she was born. You could tell, she was a fish!! She would automatically hold her breath underwater and would kick her legs and pull with her arms to swim from one person to another under water. It was one of the coolest things I'd ever seen.
I started the VES swimming when she was about 6 mo.'s. I would have started earlier but being a winter baby, even in NC, the weather was a major roadblock to that desire.
Eric, I saw a TV show about that "water ape" theory decades ago, including the part about the pattern of hair growth. I think that was the first time I'd seen videos of very young babies being tossed into water and automatically holding their breath, whereas (according to the show) if you try that with other primates they just drown. Then I never encountered it again, though I've always sort of kept my ears pricked for it. I can't say if the theory held up scientifically, but it was an awfully entertaining show. NOVA or something.
And now, with the magic of search engines:
http://historyplanet.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/aquatic-ape-theory/
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