Theory of Unknown Origin: Pseudoarchaeology

By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff

What do aliens, Nazis and the lost city of Atlantis have in common? A great deal, unfortunately, but not because of any global conspiracy hiding humanity’s secret history, as many pseudoscientific documentaries claim. The debunked and outlandish theories that aliens built the Pyramids or giants conquered the ancient world, are common enough fodder for shows like Ancient Aliens; however, though many view these ideas as entertaining crocks, the arguments are heavily rooted in a history of white supremacist doctrine.

These conspiracy theories prey on peoples’ paranoia and love of the fantastical to funnel audiences into a larger web of Shoah (or Holocaust) denial, Great Replacement Theory and other racist ideologies that ultimately pave the way for greater revisions of modern history.

Hyperdiffusionism and the Americas

Americans have been rewriting the history of this land dating to the country’s foundations. In an effort to defend the Indian Removal Act and justify what would become the Trail of Tears, President Andrew Jackson argued in his 1830 “Second Annual Message” that the Indigenous people were not the original inhabitants of North America. Rather, the continent had once been populated by a white, technologically superior race that the progenitors of the Indigenous people killed off in what modern conspiracy theorists call a “white genocide,” according to Sapiens.

“In the monuments and fortifications of an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the West, we behold the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated or has disappeared to make room for the existing savage tribes,” said Jackson.

He was referring to the Mound Builders — ancient Indigenous peoples who created terraced, earthen mounds throughout much of the East Coast and Midwest that served as ceremonial sites, residences for religious and political leaders, effigies and more. The presence of such advanced and sturdy construction did not suit the characterization of the Indigenous peoples as “savages” who needed to be controlled and civilized; therefore, Jackson and many others attributed these accomplishments to an unknown previous “race.” This reconceptualization played into U.S. political goals, helping to justify Manifest Destiny as a reclamation of stolen land — rather than the act of stealing land — and the genocide of the Indigenous peoples as a necessity to give survivors the “gift” of civilization.

Though widely debunked, the same idea continues to resurface under different names thanks to the popularity of the pseudoarchaeological hypothesis of hyperdiffusionism. Proponents of hyperdiffusionism explain the similarities between ancient cultures — such as the presence of pyramid-like structures around the world — by arguing that a single, highly advanced (and frequently “white”) race once dominated the planet, disseminating these practices to almost every continent.

Hyperdiffusionism was the favorite theory of Frank Collin (a.k.a Frank Joseph), the former-Midwest coordinator of the American Nazi Party and founder of the National Socialist Party of America. He, as well as leading Nazi Heinrich Himmler and members of his German pseudoscientific propaganda organization Ahnenerbe, argued that these ancient people were the Aryan race, the direct ancestors of the Nazis. The Aryans, in the Nazi imagination, were a group of tall, blonde, white Europeans who conquered the world under the symbol of the Swastika (“explaining” why the symbol appears in both Asia and the Americas), and even inhabited the lost island of Atlantis.

Modern white supremacists promote a similar, but rebranded, idea called the Solutrean hypothesis, which posits that the ancient people of the Solutré region of France — who lived approximately 21,000 years ago — were the first to populate North America by crossing the Atlantic Ocean on pack ice. Few archaeologists or geneticists subscribe to this theory, which is largely based on similarities between ancient arrowheads in France and North America. White supremacists have latched onto it, however, and use it in conjunction with the current favored theory that people coming from Asia populated the Americas to argue the European Solureans were there first, and the Indigenous people are descended from the “Mongoloids” who came later. This interpretation ignores a fundamental characteristic of the Solutreans, who likely preceded racial diversification and so, being not long out of Africa, were Black.

Ancient astronauts

Eventually, as oceanic exploration made it more difficult to believe in the lost city of Atlantis and science fiction grew in popularity, these racist ideas transitioned from a focus on ancient humans to ancient alien astronauts. Capitalizing on this trend were authors such as Erich von Däniken, who wrote the 1968 bestseller Chariots of the Gods?, arguing that extraterrestrial beings visited Earth to influence technology, religion and civilization as a whole. Most aliens in “ancient astronaut” theories are, unsurprisingly, Aryan-looking, and some proponents argue that they bred the “superior” white genetics into humanity.

Like the myth of the Mound People, these aliens are inventions used to explain how ancient people of color — especially Africans and Meso- and South Americans — were able to build architectural marvels like the Pyramids of Giza and Cholula. Notably, these theories do not include European achievements.

Most recent pseudoscholarship has focused on Peru’s Nazca Lines and mummies, which, in part, inspired the worst installment of the Indiana Jones series, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The Nazca Lines are massive images carved between 500 B.C.E. and 500 C.E. by ancient Peruvians who sculpted the soil into artwork visible only from the sky, which, subsequently, makes it easy for conspiracy theorists to tie them to aliens. This is often coupled with falsified research conducted on stolen mummies, which are said to have an “extraterrestrial” look due to elongated skulls from the practice of artificial cranial deformation. Cultures around the world, including in Europe, have practiced similar skull-binding techniques.

According to the Atlantic, individuals who promote these theories and benefit from the myriad fraudulent documentaries on them — such as Unearthing Nazca — have also taken to removing the mummies’ fingers and reattaching them to other bodies to give the illusion of long, alien-like digits.

Rather than thoughtfully exploring these rich civilizations, conspiracy theorists purposefully distort or outright falsify the historical record to serve modern political agendas. Recognizing the power of these ancient cultures jeopardizes the baseless arguments for white superiority, so believers, in order to maintain current racist power dynamics, have to explain them away by any means necessary.

Though rewriting the narrative to serve a political agenda may have begun with ancient history, under the Trump administration, it is rapidly spreading to the recent past. Conspiracy theories about aliens and Atlantis may be kind of funny, but they quickly funnel audiences into a conspiracy pipeline that denies school shootings and argues that the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection was a “day of love,” feeding a climate of willful ignorance and blind hatred.

Tolerating any such anachronisms and false histories — no matter how benign they seem — only perpetuates the pattern of systemic racism, bigotry and violence.