A Theory You've Never Heard Of Michael Robinson TEDxUniversityofHartford - European reacts

react today and check out a

theory

you've

never

heard

of from Michael Robinson on tedx from the University of Hartford and oh it's old now, it's from November 2015. Just jump in and let's get started, we'll see what that one is about

theory

today. I'll be talking about a theory you've

never

heard

of and hopefully by the end you'll think, like me, that it really is something no one talks about and yet it has changed the world and continues to change it. Hmm, it's called the hermetic hypothesis. It's an idea that developed over hundreds of years and became very popular in the 19th century, but continues to affect parts of the world today, particularly Africa.

It is the subject of a book I wrote and will be published soon. It's coming out in a couple of months called The Lost White Tribe explores scientists and a theory that changed a continent this story uh well, I should tell you that I'm an exploration historian and that's my job. I look at the explorers and the expeditions and the cultural encounters with people from all over the world and why people think these Expeditions are so important at home and this story of the lost white tribe that I'm going to talk about and the medical hypothesis really It came out of a book I wrote about 10 years ago called The Coldest Crucible and that was about Arctic exploration and in a way I never would have imagined that this book about the Arctic would have led me to the project that I'm working on now because this book is about The Arctic and the Hamitic Hypothesis is really about Africa, but it actually grew out of part of that earlier topic I was writing about about Arctic exploration.

I was particularly interested in American explorers and how in the 19th century American explorers found it so interesting to go to the Arctic, a really dangerous place for many dozens of Americans. They lost their lives going there either to try to find a Northwest Passage or to get to the North Pole, but I found this story of an explorer named Villa Moore Stephenson and he went to the Arctic not to try to get to the North Pole, but to find undiscovered peoples and while he was in the high country of Canada in a place called Victoria Island he discovered a group of Inuit whom he described when he returned as blondes or what he called blonde Eskimos and I thought this was the strangest story, I want I mean, I couldn't stop reading about her, there were stories all over the United States at the time, in fact the world press picked up the story of the blonde Eskimos of Victoria Island, some people thought it was completely false. a hoax, other people thought it was some kind of surprising discovery that needed to be explained, but I couldn't do anything with it, it had no role to play in the story I was telling, so I saved it in a file and what What I found was that over the next six years I started to find more and more stories of these tribes, these white tribes that people had discovered all over the world, so, for example, in Panama, Richard Marsh finds a group that called the White Indians and in Central Asia there is a group of people who said they found Tibetans who looked like Aryans and in some parts of Africa people were also finding white tribes and in Japan people discovered in the late 19th century a group called the Ainu on the northern island of Japan who They said looked Caucasian, so when I arrived in about 2008 I had this giant archive of strange white tribe discoveries and I thought now was the time to do something with it, but there was one story in particular that stuck out to me. was interested and that was the story of a discovery that took place in East Africa in the 1870s.

In that red box you see there, it occurred just west of Lake Victoria, one of the largest lakes in the world, and was made by a very famous explorer, Henry Morton Stanley, now Stanley may be familiar to you as the guy who discovers or rescues Livingston in the heart of Africa in 1869; in fact, the phrase Dr. Livingston, I suppose, was supposedly something that Stanley said to Livingston when This is one of the most famous expeditions of the 19th century, but Stanley returned to Africa and returned many times and in his later expedition to Africa he did not It was not to find Livingston but to try to discover the origin of the Nile.

In the late 19th century, there were many lakes in the areas of East Africa, what we call the East African Rift Valley, and that one of these lakes would have been the source of the Nile, something geographers had been searching for 2000 years, but Stanley said. I'm going to find out which of these legs it really is, so he travels to East Africa and determines with great confidence that Lake Victoria is the ultimate source of the Nile. 4,000 miles of the Nile River and that's the source, but what ? He also discovers that it is something that in a sense creates a new mystery: he discovers that there are members of a force of African soldiers who are protecting him who look white and he calls them Greeks in white shirts.

He can't believe how the light completes them. He asks other members of his expedition party who these men are and they tell him that they come from the western mountains to a mountain called Gumbaragara, so he writes about this and sends these reports home and the illustrations of the narrative to him. . Show Mount Gambaragara on the left side of the illustration. You can see it in the background. This became a big story at home. This lost white race that Stanley had found in the heart of Africa. Now, how in God's name would Stanley have explained? This, in the late 18th century, what kind of theoretical foundation could people use or information why you would find a group of white people living in the heart of Africa?

In fact, Stanley was very much like a 19th century man in this transition. moment between people who use the Bible as a way to explain the history of the world and people who use science as a way to explain the history of the world and therefore when Stanley thought about it, he actually looked back , to the Middle Ages, when people tried to explain the differences that we saw in the people of the world, what we would call racial differences and look at the Genesis stories particularly the story of Noah and in the story of Noah, we all know about Noah and the flood, but many people I don't know what happened after them, yes, what happened Noah Parks, the ark on the top of the city of Mount Error when he landed with his family and his three sons, Shem Jaffeth and Ham, and they were really these three children that many people in.

The Middle Ages and with that we are talking about Jews. Christians and Muslims see this story as a kind of explanation of how the world was repopulated after being wiped out in Genesis 9. And as you can see here, this is a medieval map showing the three sons of Noah on the three known continents of the world. world Asia at the top you see the little arch there at the top hanging over Ararat and the base of the word semit comes from Sam Noah sun and then in the bottom left corner is Europe, this map is rotated to the east, so true, in the lower left you see Europe and that is joffe, the son of jaffet and then the precursor of all the Africans, people thought they were descendants of the ham and that's how it was when Stanley talks about this white tribe he says somehow this they must be related they must be related in some way to the Ham tribe they were known as Hamites but this was a transition point and Stanley was a very intelligent man and he was also not in that not only reading his Bible, he was also reading Darwin and I was reading Charles Lyle, who in a sense were beginning to dismantle a kind of biblical history of the world.

Guys like Darwin and Lyle said the world was not 6,000 years old, but hundreds of thousands of years old. They had no idea how old it really was, um, but it was very, very old and on top of that, maybe the species didn't stay fixed over time, maybe the species changed over time, maybe in fact humans some Sometimes they looked like something else and that's how Stanley began. trying to take these old ideas and turn them into new ideas and a lot of other people at that time did that too and interestingly the Hamitic hypothesis, this idea that all Africans came from the descendants of Ham, that son of Noah somehow changed strangely. a no the hamites are not all africans the hamites are an invasion of white people that occurred in the ancient past and this invasion of white people explains why we are finding white tribes all over the world now if this sounds a little strange give me a little to reinforce this was not a crazy idea like, for example, scientists looking for Sasquatch or people trying to test cold fusion.

This was an anthropologist, linguists, paleontologists, all kinds of scientists across the spectrum were interested in this. This is a map, for example, from an anthropologist. named Griffith Taylor, who was actually trying to describe what he saw as the racial dispersal of non-Asian groups around the world. Now you'll look and it looks like a swirl map, but just to orient yourself here, the center of the map is Asia and as you can see, there are these sort of initial outward flows of the darker races. Griffith Taylor believed that the early races of the human species were primitive and that later races of the species were more advanced and, like most 19th century Europeans.

Americans, when they thought about primitive and advanced, also saw it as a racial ladder and that primitive meant dark skin and advanced meant light skin, so they created a kind of color map of the world to give you another example. This is the lava flow analogy that all races of the human species first emerged in Asia and that gradually the later more advanced races, i.e. the white race rolled over the other races and spread as they conquered, conquered and it led to the edges, the darker race people of the world intermarried with them or conquered them, so this was this idea that could somehow explain why you would find white tribes in strange areas.

It also fit very well with what was happening at the end of the 19th century. 19th century, new white tribes were taking over other places in the world. Europeans fought madly for colonial possessions from Asia to Africa. In fact, this late 19th century map of Africa essentially shows color codes. Here are different color codes for European countries. So green is British Portuguese, German is Italian, purplish is German, literally all of Africa had been divided by European countries while they were trying to grow. The white ancestors who had done this before fit the European way of thinking at the time and as European settlers.

They came to these parts of Africa and looked at various groups of Africans, they said: these are the Hamites, these are these proto-whites, let's treat them a little differently than these people that we consider black Africans and so on in the course of the late 19th century, some Groups like the Behemoth, the Batutzi of Rwanda, the Nayamweze of Tanzania, were called white and other groups were called like the Bahutu of Rwanda, they were called black. Now, at that time, Africans did not have the same idea of ​​racial concept, eh, they thought mainly in ethnic or clan terms and yet these ideas became popular and they also allowed the Europeans and North Americans when they looked at the great type of legacy of African civilizations when they looked at, for example, the Great Zimbabwe or the Great Pyramids they clearly said that black cultures could not have created these must have been the Hamites, those highly advanced ancient white invaders who were here thousands of years ago, so this hermetic hypothesis also became a way to explain the justification of white colonization.

Like all of these interesting things that are found in Africa that were essentially taken from the Africans themselves, there is also a very dark side to the Hemitic hypothesis, which is this even after the Europeans left Africa in the 1960s and these countries became independent even after the Hamitic hypothesis was essentially discarded as not being true, even after that time Africans themselves had begun to adapt and adopt the Hamitic hypothesis as part of their own history, so e.g. batutzi of Rwanda are considered to be of non-African origin and Other groups in Africa, as well as in Iraq and Tanzania, are considered to be of Mediterranean, not African, origin, and this racial conflict between the two groups was something that became important and e.g. , the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

It was much easier for the Hutu. seeing the Batutzi as foreigners, literally as non-African invaders of their own country and made it much easier for them to exterminate them now. I'm not saying that's the only reason for the Rwandan genocide, but it was one of the important factors and So that's the sad part of the story, but there's another part and I want to end with this other part, which is an interesting part of the story. story, in which we haven't really returned to the original question, which was whether these things are not so. Not true, if Stanley wasn't seeing white people in the heart of Africa, then what was he seeing?

So I went to Africain 2013 and I actually climbed that mountain that Stanley was looking at and was completely unprepared for. I mean, I run. I thought I was in pretty good shape, but this mountain was seventeen thousand Fleet High, there's a glacier at the top and I wasn't really prepared for that, but here I am before I get to that point, um and uh, I wanted to see like I told him to my guide who wanted to see what Stanley saw and my guide, who was a member of the Bacondro tribe, looked at me and said there are no white people on the top of that mountain and I said, I know there aren't.

There aren't any, but I want to think about what Stanley saw and I came up with a tentative hypothesis and the tentative hypothesis is this. I think Stanley saw differences. I think he looked at the people and said these people don't look anything alike. These people now know that in terms of human diversity, Africa is the most diverse continent in the world. There is more human diversity, that is, physical diversity in Africa than anywhere else because inside Africa there is a much longer evolutionary time period for the human species than outside. of that, so I think he saw the human difference and then it leaked and this is my own theory and I'm very proud of it, it leaked what I call the Mr.

Magoo hypothesis, yeah, for those of you who are too young. to remember Mr. Magoo, he was a Don Quixote-like figure who was so short-sighted that you put him in a room and he didn't really know where he was and thought he was somewhere else, but everything he liked collided with o When he did hit, he interpreted as if he were in that other place because his expectations of where he was were so strong that they filtered practically all the information that came in and I think that almost all Explorers, probably all Taurus, suffer from the Mr.

Magoo hypothesis, which it's that they too. in a sense, filtering everything they see through their expectations of what they should see and I think Stanley, in a sense, wanted to see European people like him, he was a desperately lonely man, he lived in Africa for three years without many times without anyone else from Europe or North America and I think in a sense he wanted to identify with people and he saw this difference: cheekbones water line nose lighter skin color and trace it as white and ultimately to top it off, why What should we remember this strange hypothesis?

It was kind of an ink test for the way people saw the world, but ultimately I think we should remember the Hermetic hypothesis because when we think about the master races and Aryan domination we think about the kind of very short, very violent Nazi Germany, but in fact, there was a much longer and deeper racial theory that continues to exist today and that is the Hemetic hypothesis. Thank you very much, it was very interesting stuff. I never heard of zombies breathing too hard, too fast. I think he's going to write. about what he saw there, what he said about the last part, why the stony guys saw white people there because they were probably a little different, you know, they were probably a little isolated, so they looked a little different, well, I.

I'm not an anthropologist so I can't really explain it, but it was very interesting to hear what you think, well guys, thank you very much for watching and see you tomorrow, bye.