The German pathologist Max Westenhöfer (1871–1957) can be said to have worded an early version of AAH, which he labeled "the aquatile man" (German: aquatile Mensch), which he described in several publications during the 1930s and 1940s. Westenhöfer also disputed Charles Darwin's theory on the kinship between modern man and the great apes.[citation needed] As part of a complex and unique version of human evolution, he argued that a number of traits in modern humans derived from a fully aquatic existence in the open seas, and that humans only in recent times returned to land. In 1942, he stated: "The postulation of an aquatic mode of life during an early stage of human evolution is a tenable hypothesis, for which further inquiry may produce additional supporting evidence."[6] Westenhöfer's aquatic thesis suffered from a number of inconsistencies and contradictions, and consequently he abandoned the concept in his writings on human evolution around the end of the Second World War.[7]