No shit? Why would it contradict OoA?
Also, the "we were in the water" thing makes sense to me, too. Maybe some people think aquatic ape is arguing for full-time water immersion instead of "We spent a lot of time in swamps and by the shore"?
Geography. OOA say an ape like thing on the savannah came down from the trees when the forest dissipated through climate change (BUT NOT LIKE THAT! GOOD climate change! ) and then became human and wandered all over in a fairly direct line of spreading out. The savannah drives the bipedalism and the endurance hunting.
AA would imply that a proto human was
truly semi aquatic, as in ‘in the water as often as not’ which needs a shoreline along the vast majority of its habitat. Which isn’t happening in Africa unless you localise so much you say ‘it all happened by lake turkana’ or the then equivalent but it’s more likely if true human origin was say, the levant and the areas around the med or some swampy bit of that area. Which it actually seems like it might have been.
A middle ground is multiregionalism. We had a proto origins goodness knows where, maybe it was a pre- san-like group in south South Africa, or maybe it was the levant, went up the horn and into the levant and then bounced back and forth interbreeding with all the other sort of humans living all sorts of lifestyles (as we see humans do in tribal state, we are very adaptable) and regional groups developed their own adaptations, which all got mixed up and sloshed around with a lot of messy migration. It’s not unreasonable to think of groups who lived a very shore-based life, you can tell what people ate by looking at the isotopes in their skeleton and teeth. Where marine/aquatic life was an option, we ate it. Where it wasn’t, we ate other stuff.
I think it was one selection pressure among several, I’m not convinced we were ever truly ‘semi aquatic’ as in spending half our time in the water (we don’t have the thermoregulation for it in cooler climes) on a large scale, but I’ll buy that local groups were - like the sea gypsies today and that any group with access to a shoreline used it.
I freely admit to being a multi regionalist , and also that I feel a bit smug it’s coming back into fashion, having been mercilessly taunted for even daring to think it might be true in uni.