A Theory You've Never Heard Of | Michael Robinson | TEDxUniversityofHartford (1)

Transcriber: Francesca Sacco Reviewer: Queenie Lee

Today, I'm going to be talking about a theory you've never heard of,

and hopefully by the end of it, you'll think, as I do,

that it really is something that nobody talks about,

and yet it has changed the world and continues to change the world.

It's called the Hamitic hypothesis.

It's an idea that developed over hundreds of years,

became very popular in the 19th century,

but continues to affect parts of the world today, particularly Africa.

It's the subject of a book that I've written,

that will be coming out in a couple of months,

called The Lost White Tribe:

Explorers, Scientists, and the Theory that Changed a Continent.

This story -

Well, I should tell you, I'm a historian of exploration,

and that's my job.

I look at explorers, expeditions,

and cultural encounters with people around the world,

and why people think these expeditions are so important, back home.

And this story of the lost white tribe, which I'm going to be talking about,

and the Hamitic hypothesis,

really grew out of a book I wrote about ten 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 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 Arctic exploration.

I was particularly interested in American explorers,

and how in the 1800's,

American explorers found it so interesting to go to the Arctic,

a really dangerous place.

Many dozens of Americans 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 one explorer, his name was Vilhjalmur Stefansson,

and he went to the Arctic,

not to try to get to the North pole, but to find undiscovered peoples.

While he was in the upper region of Canada

in a place called Victoria Island,

he discovered a group of Inuit, which he described when he came back

as being blond, of being what he called blond Eskimos.

I thought this was the most bizarre story, but I could not stop reading about it.

There were stories all over the US at the time.

In fact, the worldwide press took up the story

of the Blonde Eskimos of Victoria Island.

Some people thought it was a complete fake,

that it was a hoax.

Other people thought

it was an amazing kind of discovery that needed to be explained.

But I had nothing that I could do with it,

it had no part to play in the story I was telling.

So I tucked it away in a file,

and what I found was that over the next six years or so,

I started finding more and more

kind of stories of these white tribes

that people had discovered all over the world.

So for example, in Panama,

Richard Marsh finds a group that he calls the white Indians.

In Central Asia,

there is a group of people who said they found Tibetans who looked Aryan.

In parts of Africa, people were finding white tribes as well.

And in Japan, people discovered in the late 19th century,

a group called the Ainu in the northern island of Japan,

which they said looked like Caucasians.

So, by the time I got to about 2008,

I had this giant file of kind of weird white tribe discoveries,

and I figured now is the time to do something with it.

But there was one story in particular that I was interested in,

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 happened just to the west of Lake Victoria,

one of the largest lakes in the world,

and it was made by a very famous explorer, Henry Morton Stanley.

Now, Stanley may have been familiar to you as the guy who discovers Livingstone,

or rescues Livingstone, in the heart of Africa in 1869.

In fact, the phrase "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

was supposedly something that Stanley said to Livingstone when they met.

This was one of the most famous expeditions of the 19th century.

But, Stanley went back to Africa and went back many times,

and on his subsequent expedition to Africa,

he went not to find Livingstone,

but to try to discover the source of the Nile.

People knew by the late 1800s

that there were many lakes in the areas of East Africa,

what we call the Rift Valley of East Africa,

and that one of these lakes would have been the source of the Nile,

something that geographers had been searching for, for 2,000 years.

But Stanley said, "I'm going to figure out which of these lakes it actually is."

So he treks into East Africa, and he determines with great confidence

that Lake Victoria is the ultimate source of the Nile,

4,000 miles of Nile River, and that is the source.

But what he also discovers is something that in a sense creates a new mystery,

which is he finds that there are members of an African soldier force

that are protecting him, which look white,

and he calls them "Greeks in white shirts."

He can't believe how light complected these Africans are.

He asks other members of his expedition party,

"Who are these men?"

and they say, "They come from the mountains to the West

on a mountain called Gambaragara."

So he writes about this and sends these reports back home,

and the illustrations of his narrative actually show Mount Gambaragara

over on the left-hand side of the illustration,

you can see it in the background.

This became a huge story, back home,

this lost white race that Stanley had found in the heart of Africa.

How in God's name

would Stanley have explained this in the late 18th century?

What kind of theoretical background could people use or information?

Why you would find a group of white people living in the heart of Africa?

In fact, Stanley, very much as a man of the 1800s,

was at this transition moment

between people who use the Bible as a way of explaining the history of the world

and people who use science as a way of explaining the history of the world.

So 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 peoples of the world, what we would call racial differences,

and look to the stories of Genesis, in particular the story of Noah.

And in the story of Noah, we all know about Noah and the flood,

but a lot of people don't know what happened after the flood,

which was Noah parks the Arch on the top of Mount Ararat,

disembarks with his family as well as his three sons,

Sem, Japheth, and Ham.

And it was really these three sons that many people in the Middle Ages -

by that, we're talking about Jews, Christians, and Muslims -

all look to this story as a kind of explanation

for how the world got repopulated after it was annihilated in Genesis 9.

And as you see here,

this is a medieval map showing the three sons of Noah

on the three known continents of the world.

Asia, on the top - you see the little arch there at the very top,

hanging out on the top of Ararat.

And Sem, the base of the word Semitic comes from Sem, Noah's son.

And then in the bottom left corner is Europe -

this map is rotated east, by the way.

On the bottom left, you see, Europe, and that's Japheth.

And then the forerunner of all Africans, people thought,

were the descendants of Ham.

So when Stanley talks about this white tribe, he says,

"Somehow they must be related to the tribe of Ham,"

and they became known as Hamites.

But this was a transition point.

And Stanley was a very smart man;

he was also not just reading his Bible, he was also reading Darwin,

and he was reading Charles Lyell, who were beginning to, in a sense,

dismantle a kind of biblical history of the world.

Guys like Darwin and Lyell said,

"The world was not 6,000 years old; it's hundreds of thousands of years old" -

they had no idea how old it really was.

But it was very, very old, and in addition to that,

species maybe didn't stay fixed over time, maybe species changed over time,

maybe in fact, human beings were once resembled something else.

So Stanley began to try to adopt these old ideas

and graph them to new ideas.

And a lot of other people at that time did as well.

Strangely enough, the Hamitic hypothesis,

this idea that all Africans came from the descendants of Ham,

that son of Noah,

somehow got weirdly flipped to "No, Hamites are not all Africans,

Hamites are some invasion of white people that happened in the ancient past,

and that this invasion of white people

explains why we are finding white tribes all over the world."

Now, if this sounds a little bizarre, let me kind of reinforce.

This was not some wacky idea, like,

you know, scientists who go looking for Sasquatch

or people trying to prove ColdFusion.

This was anthropologists, linguists, paleontologists,

all kinds of scientists from across the spectrum

were interested in this.

This is a map, for example,

of an anthropologists named Griffith Taylor,

who is actually trying to describe what he saw

as the racial dispersion of groups out of Asia around the world.

Now you look, and it kind of looks like a swirling map,

but just to orient you here, the middle of the map is Asia.

And as you see,

there are these kind of initial flows outward of darker races.

Now, Griffith Taylor believed

that the first races of the human species were primitive,

and that the later races of the species were more advanced.

And like most 19th century Europeans and North Americans,

when they thought about primitive and advanced,

they saw it also as a racial ladder,

and that primitive meant dark skinned and advanced meant light skinned.

So they created a kind of color map of the world:

to give you another example, he called this the Lava Flow analogy,

that all of the races of the human species emerged first in Asia,

and then gradually,

the later, more advanced, races - i.e. the white race -

kind of rolled over the other races and spread itself out

as it conquered and overcame and drove to the edges

the darker raced peoples of the world,

either intermarrying with them or conquering them.

So this was the idea that could somehow explain

why you would find white tribes in weird areas.

It also happened to fit very nicely

with what was happening in the late 19th century,

which was new white tribes were taking over other places in the world.

Europeans were madly scrambling for colonial possessions

from Asia to Africa.

In fact, this map of Africa from the late 19th century

shows, essentially, the color codes here

are different color codes for European countries:

brown is France, green is Great Britain, blue is Belgium, and purple is Germany.

Literally, all of Africa had been carved up by European countries

as they tried to grab colonies.

So, the idea that there had been white ancestors who had done this before

kind of fit the mode of European thinking at the time,

and as European colonists came into these parts of Africa,

and they looked at various groups of Africans, they said,

"These are the Hamites; these are the proto-white people.