Jason Colavito has an interesting post on some recent research that damages the Solutrean Hypothesis. For those who haven’t heard of this, Jason explains:
Fringe history believers have long used the Solutrean claim as evidence for European primacy in the Americas, a belief that stretches back at least as far as the lost white race of Mound Builders the first European colonists imagined had been killed off by bloodthirsty Natives. As Scott Wolter told it on America Unearthed, the Solutrean hypothesis explains that white Europeans were the first Americans, long before Native Americans crossed over from Asia. White supremacists like John de Nugent, Kyle Bristow, and radio host Frank from Queens have gone still farther and proposed on these grounds that America was once a white cultural homeland, possibly the Garden of Eden, before “Beringians”—i.e., non-white Native Americans—crossed over and killed them all in a violent race war.
Jason then links to an essay in Science Magazine that discusses new findings in regard to the Solutream hypothesis — and the news isn’t good for “alternative historians.”
As Jason notes, what’s really a shame (or sham) here is the notion (common in the 19th century, but still around) that the “high” civilizations of North America (think the moundbuilders and the Incas, for example), really owe their technological skill to white Europeans of the distant past. Surely the native (non-White) populations were too backward and stupid to build anything that would impress anyone.
In the Old World (e.g., Egypt) the way “researchers” foist the same covert racism on us is the ancient alien hypothesis. Surely the Egyptians, for example, needed help from space to build the pyramids. If you don’t think racism is at the heart of that idea, then you need to start reading the theosophical literature from the 19th century — an endless pool of claptrap from which alternative historians get advanced civilizations and lost continents (Atlantis, Lemuria, Hyperboreans, etc.). Those advanced civilizations settled in the north and then migrated into places like India, Egypt, and Europe … from which their enlightened descendants migrated to North America. It’s really all aliens and their advanced white progeny.
In short, all the major elements of ancient alien theory can be found in the speculative literature (and its horror fiction) from the 19th-early twentieth centuries. The ideas that were “cutting edge” 150 years ago are the urce for the “alternative” perspective alternative historians and ancient alien hucksters present to their viewers and readers today. But for folks not familiar with that stuff, it all looks and sounds so “astonishing” that it gains an audience.
Unfortunately, the fringier edges of ufology also indulge in racial theories (I bring this up because I just finished reading two sources).
Nancy Lieder, in her surprisingly bland yet ceaselessly wacky book ZetaTalk, claims humans were genetically engineered from an unnamed ape species. “This step was repeated many times, on different places on Earth, and this formed the basis for the various races of mankind you see today.” The missing link is…teams of alien lab technicians!
At first it sounds like an innocuous blend of manual and natural selection, until she outlines modern social traits derived from the (alleged) early racial composition of the different groups (what we call “essentialism”). It’s pretty ridiculous and often insulting. “Black Man” was highly promiscuous, explaining why more than one early group had dark skin. “Gypsy Man” is grim and evasive but peaceful (their human component came from Pleiadians, of course). “China Man” is more peaceful than the other races because he descended from a different ape!
Lieder brings in eugenics at one point (though she doesn’t use the term). Lieder says the Neanderthals were a flawed experiment, so the aliens gave them vasectomies!
Curiously, unlike Jason’s diffusionists, Lieder doesn’t seem to have an agenda — she just wants to explain all of human history in terms of alien contact. However, her explanation echoes — pointlessly — some ghastly arguments from a century ago: the separate non-Edenic creation of non-whites, the scientific elimination of inferior persons.
(Barney and Betty Hill are mentioned in the book; thankfully, they are nowhere near this racial disquisition.)
Martin Kottmeyer, in his book An Alien’s Who’s Who, writes about Omnec Onec, who claimed the races came from different planets. According to her website, Omnec was a Venusian from another dimension who, in 1955 at the age of 7, took physical form and “replaced” Earthling Sheila Gipson (“this is the name that is in her passport”).
Omnec says that the races originally came from four separate galaxies 40 million years ago. “The yellow race colonised the planet you know as Mars, the red race the planet Saturn, the black race Jupiter and the white race Venus.” These planets later colonised Earth. Oh, and dinosaurs also came from another galaxy!
Omnec’s racial theories seem quite benign, even positive. They are used only to argue the universality of humanity, rather than the separateness of identifiable groups. (Although Omnec does reserve the “guardianship of spiritual teachings” to the white Venusians — her own group, don’t ya know!)
http://omnec-onec.com/
very interesting – thanks for (as usual) an informative commentary.
You often refer to jason’s website, and there’s a lot of interresting information in there But I wonder what he would think about your opinion of the Bible (and your view of Genesis 6 in particular). His book is published by Prometheus press, a major atheist publisher, and the comment sections on his website are filled with disparaging comments by skeptics. I’m just wondering if it’s such a good idea to promote him so much. Sometimes I feel we see a lot of debunking (and on subjects that deserve to be so), but very little of affirming. When all the crazy ideas out there have been dealt with, what reasons do we have for believing what we do. To Jason, we probably are just another variety of nutjobs.
Not sure. He and I correspond from time to time. I wish Christians were devoting as much time to debunking this stuff as Jason is, but they aren’t.
My “view” of Gen 6 allows for the supernatural, which I presume Jason would not. But there is more than one supernaturalist view to Gen 6 than cohabitation — and even that doesn’t produce non-humans (nephilim and their clans are described as “men” — even in Gen 6:4). This actually may lean toward the second supernaturalist approach to the passage — something that will be in my Unseen Realm book.
Ultimately, though, if Jason is an atheist, what he wants is less rampant absurdity, as do I.
There is nothing racist per se in the Solutrean Hypothesis, and there is genetic and archaeological evidence to support it. Calling it racist is like stating that the theory of Evolution is racist, because some may use it to argue that certain races and cultures are more evolved, and thus superior, than others. Posting headlines like this may generate blog traffic and stir up controversy, but is disingenuous and irresponsible.
I think you just made the point.