Why do kids like playing in sand?

Many of us growing up in our idyllic, suburban childhoods filled with fresh baked apple pies and pre-9/11 carefree attitudes had the opportunity to occasionally enjoy a day on a beach or, if truly blessed, had a sandbox to call our own filled with endless possibilities of imagination and cat turds. What child couldn't spend hours sitting in a five by five box filled with sand? Why the child could dig or fill a bucket up with sand only to pour it out again. If Hot-wheels or My Little Ponies came into play, then the child could push them around and get sand jammed in the wheels or stuck in the pony hair. I recall once my pal Tad digging in his sandbox when I asked what he was looking for. Tad responded that he was digging for China. I asked what China was and Tad replied, "I think it's squishy."

Why should this be fun at all? Why do we instinctively know this to be fun? Why don't we question why plopping a kid down with some sand (especially wet sand, mind you) will amuse said kid? I mean, it's sand. It's like dirt but it washes off a little more easily. And if it's wet you can make lumps of things and then put sticks in those lumps, but when the waves come in just a little more - kiss your sticked lumps goodbye. I don't mean to degrade makin' sand sculptures, but we never really mind too much that however masterfully we've crafted them, the tide's gonna reduce them back to oblivion. And why would we mind? I mean it's just sand after all. But then why do we bother?

To explain why we play in sand requires some more controversial theory than usual. Us humans, this theory goes, are Aqua-Apes. Some small band of outsider rebel apes got separated from the rest of their apey kind and the earth trembled. This trembling caused the separation of these rebel apes onto a secret island from whence they could not escape. Now these apes feared the water - they could not swim, they could not catch fish, they were cold in the water, the palms of their hands weren't sensitive enough to locate stuff under the waves, their children and indeed even most of their adults would drown if submerged. What were they to do in their new watery/beachy hell that fate had damned them to? Were they going to give up? No, by tarnation! They were going to fight to survive! They were going to become the Aqua-Apes!! If this theory seems a little shaky to you, my fellow aqua-ape, you just haven't thought it all the way through. Thankfully Elaine Morgan has and she'll prove it to you in her books The Aquatic Ape and The Scars of Evolution.

"So, like, you're saying that we like playing in sand when we're kids, cause we were stuck on an evil island once and these apes came to save us? That's weird." No, you hypothetical jackass, you don't understand the dynamics of how human infants and children learn their social roles along with many life skills through their play. "Oh. Do the apes come from Atlantis? Is that where they get their powers?" When children play, they are learning how to become adults. Just as kittens and puppies rough-house with each other in their youth as training for defending themselves and hunting/killing prey, human kids learn to build sand-castles so they can become sand-brokers when they grow up. Or maybe it has something to do with ingraining the child to the environment so that they learn to operate in and around water as this was against the ape-child's nature. Perhaps its even more simple than that - perhaps while dad went fishing the kids had to be set in front of the TV so they wouldn't get into trouble and millions of years of sitting on beaches got us pretty bored so we learned to amuse ourselves by digging and making piles. It's probably a combination of the two, really. "So the space apes brought TVs with them from Atlantis and taught us all when we were children how to swim and how to commune with our fishy friends, so we can help Captain Planet defeat the villainous Looten Plunder and regain Neptune's scepter with the help of the sensitively-palmed Waterbearer hand given to us by the Lady of the Lake, right?" Right.