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TEDx Talks
Published: 2015-11-10
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn4bvjMh4vc
a day %HESITATION I'm gonna be talking about theory of never heard of and hopefully by the end of it you will think as I do that it really is something that nobody really talks about and yet it has changed the world and continues to change the world %HESITATION it's called the helmet a chi Pappas's yeah it's an idea that %HESITATION developed over hundreds of years became
very popular in the nineteenth century but continues to affect parts of the world today particularly Africa %HESITATION it's the subject of a book that's a lot of written that'll be coming out a couple of months called the lost weight tried explores scientists and a theory that changed a continent this story %HESITATION it well I should tell you I'm a historian of exploration and my that's my
job I look that explores in expeditions and %HESITATION cultural encounters with people around the world and why people think these expeditions are so important back home I'm in this story of of the lost weight tribe which aim to be talking about and medic have offices really grew out of the book I wrote about ten years ago called the coldest crucible and that was about arctic exploration
%HESITATION 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 high Medicaid pot this isn't really about Africa %HESITATION but it actually grew out of part of that earlier topic %HESITATION I was writing about arctic exploration I was particularly interested in American
explorers and how in the eighteen hundreds 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 the Northwest Passage where to get to the North Pole %HESITATION but I found this story of one explorer is name was billion more Stephenson and he went to the arctic not to
try to get to the North Pole but to find undiscovered people's and while he was in %HESITATION the upper region of of Canada in a place called Victoria island he discovered a group of anyway %HESITATION which he described when he came back as being blond of being what he called blind Eskimos and I thought this is the most bizarre story about a couldn't stop reading about
it %HESITATION there were stories all over the United States at the time in fact worldwide press took up the story of the blind Eskimos Victoria island some people thought it was a complete fake that it was a hoax other pop people thought it was %HESITATION an amazing %HESITATION %HESITATION kind of discovery that needed to be splaine %HESITATION but I had nothing that I could do with
it I it had no part to play in the story I was telling so tucked 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 tribes these white tribes that people have discovered all over the world so for example in %HESITATION Panama Richard marsh finds a group that he
calls the white Indian and %HESITATION in Central Asia there's a group of people who said they found I Tibetans who looked area %HESITATION and in parts of Africa people are finding white tribes as well and in Japan people discovered in the late nineteenth century a group called the I knew in the northern island of Japan which they said looks like Caucasians so by the time I
got to about two thousand and eight I had this giant file of kind of weird white tribe discoveries and I figured now was the time %HESITATION to to do something with it but there is one story in particular that I was interested in and that was the story of %HESITATION %HESITATION the discovery that took place in East Africa in the eighteen seventies %HESITATION in that red
box that you see there it happened %HESITATION 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 be familiar to you as the guy who um discovers living stand or rescues Livingstone %HESITATION in the heart of Africa in eighteen sixty nine the fact that phrase doctor
Livingston I presume %HESITATION was supposedly something that that that Stanley said to Livingston when they met this is one of the most famous expeditions of the nineteenth century but Stanley went back to Africa went back many times and on his subsequent expedition to Africa he went not to find Livingston but to try to discover the source of the Nile %HESITATION the people knew by the late
eighteen hundreds that there were many lakes %HESITATION 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 have been searching for for two thousand years %HESITATION but Stanley said I'm going to figure out which of these lakes it actually is so he tracks into East
Africa and he determines with great confidence that Lake Victoria is the ultimate source of the Nile four thousand miles of Nile river and that is the source but when he also discovers a 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 on he asks other members of his expedition party who are these men and they say they come from the mountains to the west and up and up on a mountain called Gomorrah Gara so he writes about this and sends these reports back home and the illustrations of his narrative actually show mount doom Barakar %HESITATION over
on the left hand side of the illustration you can see it in the background this became a huge story back home this week lost white race that Stanley had found in the heart of Africa now how on how in god's name would stand we have explained this %HESITATION in the late eighteenth century what kind of kind of theoretical background could people user information why you would
find a group of white people living in the heart Africa in fact Stanley very much as a man of the eighteen eighteen hundreds was that this transition moment between people who use the Bible as a way of explaining the history of the world and people who used science is a way of explaining the history of the world and so when Stanley thought about it you actually
look back to the Middle Ages when people try to explain the differences that we saw in the peoples of the world what we would call racial differences %HESITATION and look to the stories of genesis in particular the story of Noah and in the story of now we all know about now and flood but a lot of people don't know what happened after the flood which was
%HESITATION Noah parks the %HESITATION the arc on the town top of mount Ararat disembarks with his family as well as his three sons %HESITATION Sam job fifth and him and it was really these three sons that many people in the Middle Ages and by that we're talking about Jews Christians and Muslims all look to the story as a kind of explanation for how the world got
repopulated after was annihilated in genesis nine and as you see here this is a medieval map showing the three sons of Noah on three known continents of the world Asia on the top you see little arc there at the very top hanging out on top of %HESITATION Ararat %HESITATION and and send the base of the word semitic comes from Sam know a son and then in
the bottom left corner is Europe this map is rotated east by the way on the bottom left you see %HESITATION Europe and that's job that the son of job and then the four runner of all Africans people thought were the descendants of ham so this is with someone Stanley talks about that's why try to some how this must they must be related they must be somehow
related to the tribe of him you can notice him lights but this was a transition point Stanley was a very smart man and he was also not in it not just reading his Bible he was also reading Darwin and he was reading Charles Lyle who were beginning to in a sense dismantle a kind of biblical history of the world guys like Darwin and Lyle said the
world was not six thousand years old it's hundreds of thousands of years old they had no idea how well that really hunt but it was very very old and in addition to that species may be didn't stay fixed overtime maybe species changed over time maybe in fact human beings were once resembled something out and so Stanley began to try to adopt these old ideas and draft
them to new ideas and a lot of other people at the time did as well and strangely enough the hermetic hypothesis this idea that all Africans came from the descendants of ham that son of Noah somehow got weird we flipped to know hamlets or not all Africans hamlets are some invasion of white people that happened in the ancient past and that this invasion of white people
explains why we're finding white tribes all over the world now if this sounds a little bizarre let me kind of reinforce this is not some wacky idea like you know scientists who go looking for Sasquatch or people trying to prove cold fusion this was anthropologists linguists paleontologists %HESITATION %HESITATION all kinds of scientists from across the spectrum we're interested in this this is a map for example
of an anthropologist 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 at it kind of looks like a swirling mass but just to orient you hear the middle of the map is Asia and as you see there are these kind of %HESITATION initial %HESITATION kind of flows out word
of darker races now Griffith Taylor believe that the first races of the human species were primitive and that the later %HESITATION races of the species were more advanced and like most nineteenth century Europeans and north Americans when they thought about primitive and advanced they saw it also has a racial ladder and that primitive man dark skinned and advancement light skin so they created a kind of
color map of the world %HESITATION to give you another example %HESITATION he he called this the lava flow analogy that all of the room duh races of the human species emerged first in Asia and then gradually the later more advanced races I eat 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 of the world either intermarrying with them are conquering them so this is this idea that could somehow explain why you would find %HESITATION white tribes in weird areas it also happen to fit very nicely with what was happening in the nineteen late nineteen century which was new white tribes were taking over other places in the world %HESITATION Europeans were madly scrambling for colonial
possessions from Asia to Africa in fact this map of Africa from the late nineteenth century shows essentially the color codes here are different color codes for European countries brown is France green is Great Britain Lewis Belgian %HESITATION that purplish color is German literally all of Africa had been carved up by European countries as they try to grab colonies so the idea that there had been white
ancestors who had done this before kind of fit the mood of European thinking at the time as European colonists came into these parts of Africa and they looked at various groups of Africans they said these are the headlights these are these proto white people let's treat them slightly different than these people that we think of as being black African and so over the course of the
late nineteenth century some groups like the boy who about him on the back to the sea of Rwanda %HESITATION than that I am ways a of Tanzania were called white and other groups a call like the Baku two of Rwanda were called black now at the time you met Africans had it did not themselves did not have the same idea of right racial concept right %HESITATION
they thought most mostly in terms of ethnic or clan terms and yet these ideas caught on and it also allowed Europeans and north Americans when they looked at the great kind of legacy of African civilizations when they look for example at great Zimbabwe where the great pyramids they said clearly black %HESITATION cultures couldn't have created these these must of been the hammer heights right those ancient
very highly advanced white invaders who were here thousands of years ago and so this Hamitic hypothesis became a wave explaining justifying white colonization as well as all of the school stuff that you find in Africa and that was essentially taken away from Africans themselves %HESITATION there's this very dark side to the hermetic hypothesis as well which is this even after Europeans left Africa in the nineteen
sixties and these countries became independent even after the semitic hypothesis essentially was exploded as not being true even after that time Africans themselves had started to adapt and adopt the helmet hypothesis as a part of their own history so for example the by Tutsi of Rwanda consider themselves as having an origin outside of Africa and other groups in Africa as well %HESITATION the Iraq war of
Tanzania see themselves as having a Mediterranean origin not an African one and this racial conflict between the two groups with something that became important in for example the Rwandan genocide of nineteen ninety four it was much easier for the Hutu see the but Tutsi as foreign as literally non African invaders of their own country and made it that much easier for them stormy saying that the
only reason for the Rwandan one of the factors sad part but there's another part now one and on this other an interesting which is we really haven't actually gotten back to the original question which was if these things aren't true Stanley wasn't act seen white people heart of Africa then what was he seeing so I went to Africa and and %HESITATION two thousand thirteen and I
actually climb that mountain that Stanley was looking at which I was totally unprepared for a minute I I run I thought I was in pretty good shape but this man was seventeen thousand feet high there's a glacier on the top of it and I wasn't really prepared for that but here I am before I got to that point %HESITATION and %HESITATION I wanted to see if
they told my guide I wanted to see what Stanley saw and my guide who is of a member of the contra tried he looked at me said is no white people on the top of that mountain and I said yeah I know there aren't I know there are but I want to think about what Stanley saw and I came up with a provisional hypothesis and the
provisional hypothesis I think Stanley did see difference he did look at people said anything like we now know that in terms of and diversity RVCA is the most diverse because world there's more human diversity I eat physical diversity in any other place because within Africa is a much longer evolutionary period time for the human species then outside of it so I think he did see human
difference and then it was filtered through not this is my own fear and I'm very proud of it if filter what I call the Mister Magoo hypothesis so for those of you who are too %HESITATION young to remember Mister Magoo Hughes this Don Quixote like figure who is so near sighted that you'd stick him in a room and he wouldn't really know where he was and