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Desmond Morris’s best-seller The Naked Ape radically changed my life in three ways. It convinced me (and millions of other non-scientists) that anthropology was fascinating and that we could grasp at least part of what it was saying. Then there was that vivid summary of the conventional wisdom, which seemed to me to present a strictly male-centred view, and eventually stung me into writing my own best-seller (The Descent of Woman) in 1972.

But what really bowled me over was a short passage in the book, referring to a question posed by Antarctic zoologist and marine biologist Alister Hardy in 1960, namely “Was Man more aquatic in the past?” Few people had heard of that. It had been rejected as rubbish and hastily hushed up. I thought it was brilliant, and manifestly true.

I’d previously enjoyed a rewarding career writing for television, winning a couple of Bafta awards and a Writer of the Year award, but that was now over. It didn’t end overnight, but my scripts became increasingly perfunctory – I’d got far too absorbed in anthropology – and perfunctory playwrights don’t last long in television.

Over the years I wrote a second book about human evolution, and a third, fourth, and fifth, promoting Hardy’s views. But the attitude of professionals towards the aquatic hypothesis remained unrelentingly frigid. Only over the last decade has evidence begun to mount up that he might have been right, and increasing numbers of scientists are prudently refraining from committing themselves, waiting to see which way the cat will jump.