Yes, Mermaids exist.

 They have existed forever, and they didn’t always look like this…

They were always like this and never like this.

Originally, they came from the long ignored hypothesis of a “water chimp” theory of human evolution. Which is to say that there’s nothing in the anthropological record to explain the huge differences between chimpanzees — the second smartest of primates along with gorillas — our hairlessness, all-around puniness, and propensity for settling not in jungles but always in the immediate vicinity of water. Also brains. Chimps famously have 99.5 percent of the same DNA we have, but they have less verbal capacity and, not to put too fine a point on it, far less articulate verbal intelligence than parrots. Because birds have the same ancestry and, hence, latent wings available when needed. Angel symbolism begins with Sirens and mermaids.

They didn’t start out looking like pre-Raphaelite paintings.

They were originally as aggressive and occasionally violent as the hairy jungle primates. They were also intensely vocal. Why they were known as Sirens. And they were predators.

What also seems possible at least is that they were shapeshifters, not of our space or time or dimension, but older than human life, maybe involved in the creation of Homo sapiens. Why the oldest known advanced human civilization in recorded history, the Sumerians, had gods who looked like fish, stank like fish, stood upright, and taught language to primitive men, whom they bred and used as slaves to mine gold.

They were an alien invader, founders of what we remember as historical civilization, breeders of the water chimps who could not live in the water but camped upon it, and learned how to speak and write less beautifully than the Sirens.

They could appear to us in any guise. They were ALL the old gods we had. And they encouraged us to mythologize them as beautiful women with and without tails as sex permitted. The romance of mermaids was born. Until the Borg assimilated them too.

They morphed quickly under the control of the Borg. But that’s grist for another post.