1. I have a few thoughts on Atlantis and other "lost" civilizations, ancient mound builders, Abraham Lincoln, Ezra Pound, the anthropologist Leo Frobenius, West African art and space aliens. Maybe also Jack Kirby.
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7. Now, Frobenius was not a Nazi (and in fact his positive view of African history was an inspiration for anti-imperial revolt). But of course some Nazis used his ideas to argue that Atlantis was the Aryan homeland.https://twitter.com/ExplorationBlog/status/1102285617076060163 …
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8. With his search for Atlantis in Africa (which inspired Nazi expeditions), Frobenius seems like a character out of pulp fiction: H. Rider Haggard, Lovecraft or the Indiana Jones movies. But of course, those fictions drew on figures like Frobenius.
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8. I think it's the Lovecraftian tradition that wedded the idea of ancient advanced civilizations with the science fiction conceit of alien visitations (from either other planets or dimensions). The up-lifting advanced white civilization became the advanced alien civilization
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9. I think with the creation of Black Panther in 1966, Jack Kirby was trying to see if this rather dismal tradition could be repurposed to anti-racist ends, with the role of the advanced hidden civilization being taken by Wakanda, a black nation.
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10. As a science fiction or pulp conceit, the idea of ancient astronauts is fun. But I do think people who palm it off as an actual theory (i.e von Däniken) are doing a lot of harm: poisoning our ability to appreciate these ancient cultures on their own terms.
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11. At bottom, these theories always show a fundamental failure of imagination: an inability to believe that there existed human communities outside the western tradition who created strange, wonderful, complex artifacts, sometimes beyond our skills.
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Or pyramids in central/South America which were definitely built by aliens because natives couldn’t do that or some malarkey
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the soultrean hypothesis is still with us
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The Greek coins found in mounds. The ancient mummies found buried in crypts beneath Lexington, KY. The Welsh relicts of the Ohio Valley. And so on.
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