A Theory You've Never Heard Of | Michael Robinson | TEDxUniversityofHartford
A Theory You've Never Heard Of | Michael Robinson | TEDxUniversityofHartford
The Hamitic Hypothesis was a 19th century anthropological theory that claimed that humans originated in Asia and then migrated to other regions of the world. The theory was used to explain the discovery of so-called “white races” in Africa in the late 1800s. The Hamitic Hypothesis was not simply a curiosity of anthropological science. It was an idea that changed lives: from those European colonists who relied upon it to justify their presence in Africa, to the scientists who used it to explain away the accomplishments of African civilizations as a result of “white” influence. Ultimately, the Hamitic Hypothesis anchored a global theory of human origins and migration that, when combined with the Aryan race theory, shaped anthropology, colonial policy, and even the attitudes of Africans themselves for a hundred years.
Michael Robinson is a historian of science and exploration at the University of Hartford. He is the author of “The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture.” His new book The Lost White Tribe: Explorers, Scientists, and the Theory that Changed a Continent” comes out with Oxford University Press in December.
This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx
Content
0 -> Transcriber: Francesca Sacco
Reviewer: Queenie Lee
2.626 -> Today, I'm going to be talking about
a theory you've never heard of,
6.112 -> and hopefully by the end of it,
you'll think, as I do,
9.607 -> that it really is something
that nobody talks about,
12.607 -> and yet it has changed the world
and continues to change the world.
17.507 -> It's called the Hamitic hypothesis.
20.261 -> It's an idea that developed
over hundreds of years,
24.161 -> became very popular in the 19th century,
26.714 -> but continues to affect parts
of the world today, particularly Africa.
31.472 -> It's the subject of a book
that I've written,
33.773 -> that will be coming out
in a couple of months,
35.913 -> called The Lost White Tribe:
37.331 -> Explorers, Scientists,
and the Theory that Changed a Continent.
41.651 -> This story -
43.671 -> Well, I should tell you,
I'm a historian of exploration,
46.291 -> and that's my job.
47.55 -> I look at explorers, expeditions,
49.922 -> and cultural encounters
with people around the world,
54.196 -> and why people think these expeditions
are so important, back home.
58.345 -> And this story of the lost white tribe,
which I'm going to be talking about,
61.985 -> and the Hamitic hypothesis,
63.309 -> really grew out of a book
I wrote about ten years ago
66.309 -> called The Coldest Crucible,
and that was about Arctic exploration.
70.849 -> And in a way, I never would have imagined
that this book about the Arctic
75.37 -> would have led me to the project
I'm working on now,
78.994 -> because this book is about the Arctic,
80.872 -> and the Hamitic hypothesis
is really about Africa,
84.092 -> but it actually grew out of part
of that earlier topic.
88.107 -> I was writing about Arctic exploration.
90.111 -> I was particularly interested
in American explorers,
93.526 -> and how in the 1800's,
95.716 -> American explorers found it
so interesting to go to the Arctic,
98.856 -> a really dangerous place.
100.446 -> Many dozens of Americans
lost their lives going there,
103.236 -> either to try to find a Northwest Passage
or to get to the North pole.
108.276 -> But I found this story of one explorer,
his name was Vilhjalmur Stefansson,
112.613 -> and he went to the Arctic,
114.297 -> not to try to get to the North pole,
but to find undiscovered peoples.
118.447 -> While he was in the upper region of Canada
122.807 -> in a place called Victoria Island,
124.787 -> he discovered a group of Inuit,
which he described when he came back
129.337 -> as being blond, of being
what he called blond Eskimos.
135.107 -> I thought this was the most bizarre story,
but I could not stop reading about it.
139.675 -> There were stories
all over the US at the time.
142.014 -> In fact, the worldwide press
took up the story
144.575 -> of the Blonde Eskimos of Victoria Island.
146.795 -> Some people thought
it was a complete fake,
148.845 -> that it was a hoax.
149.955 -> Other people thought
151.441 -> it was an amazing kind of discovery
that needed to be explained.
156.911 -> But I had nothing that I could do with it,
159.001 -> it had no part to play
in the story I was telling.
161.541 -> So I tucked it away in a file,
163.579 -> and what I found was
that over the next six years or so,
167.189 -> I started finding more and more
170.289 -> kind of stories of these white tribes
174.549 -> that people had discovered
all over the world.
177.289 -> So for example, in Panama,
179.704 -> Richard Marsh finds a group
that he calls the white Indians.
184.224 -> In Central Asia,
185.804 -> there is a group of people who said
they found Tibetans who looked Aryan.
191.114 -> In parts of Africa, people
were finding white tribes as well.
194.91 -> And in Japan, people discovered
in the late 19th century,
198.419 -> a group called the Ainu
in the northern island of Japan,
202.307 -> which they said looked like Caucasians.
205.177 -> So, by the time I got to about 2008,
207.619 -> I had this giant file of kind of weird
white tribe discoveries,
211.779 -> and I figured now is the time
to do something with it.
215.459 -> But there was one story in particular
that I was interested in,
218.74 -> and that was the story of a discovery
222.199 -> that took place
in East Africa in the 1870s -
226.438 -> in that red box you see there.
228.628 -> It happened just to the west
of Lake Victoria,
232.528 -> one of the largest lakes in the world,
234.558 -> and it was made by a very
famous explorer, Henry Morton Stanley.
238.552 -> Now, Stanley may have been familiar to you
as the guy who discovers Livingstone,
244.702 -> or rescues Livingstone,
in the heart of Africa in 1869.
249.887 -> In fact, the phrase
"Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"
252.95 -> was supposedly something that Stanley
said to Livingstone when they met.
257.974 -> This was one of the most famous
expeditions of the 19th century.
261.41 -> But, Stanley went back to Africa
and went back many times,
265.15 -> and on his subsequent
expedition to Africa,
267.812 -> he went not to find Livingstone,
270.022 -> but to try to discover
the source of the Nile.
273.935 -> People knew by the late 1800s
276.008 -> that there were many lakes
in the areas of East Africa,
280.368 -> what we call the Rift Valley
of East Africa,
283.159 -> and that one of these lakes
would have been the source of the Nile,
286.309 -> something that geographers
had been searching for, for 2,000 years.
290.773 -> But Stanley said, "I'm going to figure out
which of these lakes it actually is."
294.533 -> So he treks into East Africa,
and he determines with great confidence
298.194 -> that Lake Victoria
is the ultimate source of the Nile,
302.684 -> 4,000 miles of Nile River,
and that is the source.
306.772 -> But what he also discovers is something
that in a sense creates a new mystery,
310.722 -> which is he finds that there are
members of an African soldier force
315.438 -> that are protecting him, which look white,
318.728 -> and he calls them
"Greeks in white shirts."
321.4 -> He can't believe how
light complected these Africans are.
325.71 -> He asks other members
of his expedition party,
328.77 -> "Who are these men?"
329.952 -> and they say, "They come
from the mountains to the West
332.802 -> on a mountain called Gambaragara."
335.562 -> So he writes about this
and sends these reports back home,
339.051 -> and the illustrations of his narrative
actually show Mount Gambaragara
342.96 -> over on the left-hand side
of the illustration,
345.26 -> you can see it in the background.
347.49 -> This became a huge story, back home,
349.61 -> this lost white race that Stanley
had found in the heart of Africa.
353.725 -> How in God's name
355.565 -> would Stanley have explained this
in the late 18th century?
359.697 -> What kind of theoretical background
could people use or information?
364.247 -> Why you would find a group of white people
living in the heart of Africa?
367.709 -> In fact, Stanley,
very much as a man of the 1800s,
372.515 -> was at this transition moment
374.266 -> between people who use the Bible as a way
of explaining the history of the world
378.426 -> and people who use science as a way
of explaining the history of the world.
381.986 -> So when Stanley thought about it,
383.706 -> he actually looked back
to the Middle Ages,
385.723 -> when people tried
to explain the differences
388.444 -> that we saw in the peoples of the world,
what we would call racial differences,
393.461 -> and look to the stories of Genesis,
in particular the story of Noah.
397.816 -> And in the story of Noah,
we all know about Noah and the flood,
400.775 -> but a lot of people don't know
what happened after the flood,
403.627 -> which was Noah parks the Arch
on the top of Mount Ararat,
408.364 -> disembarks with his family
as well as his three sons,
413.087 -> Sem, Japheth, and Ham.
415.119 -> And it was really these three sons
that many people in the Middle Ages -
419.079 -> by that, we're talking about
Jews, Christians, and Muslims -
422.524 -> all look to this story
as a kind of explanation
425.236 -> for how the world got repopulated
after it was annihilated in Genesis 9.
430.866 -> And as you see here,
432.026 -> this is a medieval map
showing the three sons of Noah
435.212 -> on the three known
continents of the world.
437.502 -> Asia, on the top - you see
the little arch there at the very top,
440.572 -> hanging out on the top of Ararat.
443.212 -> And Sem, the base of the word Semitic
comes from Sem, Noah's son.
447.442 -> And then in the bottom
left corner is Europe -
449.658 -> this map is rotated east, by the way.
452.088 -> On the bottom left, you see,
Europe, and that's Japheth.
456.608 -> And then the forerunner
of all Africans, people thought,
459.934 -> were the descendants of Ham.
462.704 -> So when Stanley talks
about this white tribe, he says,
466.121 -> "Somehow they must
be related to the tribe of Ham,"
472.051 -> and they became known as Hamites.
474.298 -> But this was a transition point.
476.538 -> And Stanley was a very smart man;
478.437 -> he was also not just reading his Bible,
he was also reading Darwin,
482.307 -> and he was reading Charles Lyell,
who were beginning to, in a sense,
486.487 -> dismantle a kind of
biblical history of the world.
490.513 -> Guys like Darwin and Lyell said,
492.403 -> "The world was not 6,000 years old;
it's hundreds of thousands of years old" -
496.643 -> they had no idea how old it really was.
499.401 -> But it was very, very old,
and in addition to that,
502.501 -> species maybe didn't stay fixed over time,
maybe species changed over time,
507.284 -> maybe in fact, human beings
were once resembled something else.
512.038 -> So Stanley began
to try to adopt these old ideas
516.384 -> and graph them to new ideas.
519.114 -> And a lot of other people
at that time did as well.
521.565 -> Strangely enough, the Hamitic hypothesis,
524.718 -> this idea that all Africans
came from the descendants of Ham,
528.938 -> that son of Noah,
530.278 -> somehow got weirdly flipped
to "No, Hamites are not all Africans,
535.457 -> Hamites are some invasion of white people
that happened in the ancient past,
540.372 -> and that this invasion of white people
542.362 -> explains why we are finding
white tribes all over the world."
546.362 -> Now, if this sounds a little bizarre,
let me kind of reinforce.
549.645 -> This was not some wacky idea, like,
552.115 -> you know, scientists
who go looking for Sasquatch
555.145 -> or people trying to prove ColdFusion.
557.865 -> This was anthropologists,
linguists, paleontologists,
563.524 -> all kinds of scientists
from across the spectrum
566.374 -> were interested in this.
567.556 -> This is a map, for example,
569.106 -> of an anthropologists
named Griffith Taylor,
571.576 -> who is actually trying
to describe what he saw
573.875 -> as the racial dispersion of groups
out of Asia around the world.
578.355 -> Now you look, and it kind of
looks like a swirling map,
581.088 -> but just to orient you here,
the middle of the map is Asia.
584.748 -> And as you see,
586.008 -> there are these kind of initial flows
outward of darker races.
592.308 -> Now, Griffith Taylor believed
594.051 -> that the first races
of the human species were primitive,
598.184 -> and that the later races
of the species were more advanced.
602.651 -> And like most 19th century Europeans
and North Americans,
605.877 -> when they thought
about primitive and advanced,
608.19 -> they saw it also as a racial ladder,
610.63 -> and that primitive meant dark skinned
and advanced meant light skinned.
614.851 -> So they created a kind of
color map of the world:
618.45 -> to give you another example,
he called this the Lava Flow analogy,
623.52 -> that all of the races of the human species
emerged first in Asia,
628.59 -> and then gradually,
629.926 -> the later, more advanced, races -
i.e. the white race -
633.306 -> kind of rolled over the other races
and spread itself out
637.096 -> as it conquered and overcame
and drove to the edges
641.306 -> the darker raced peoples of the world,
643.869 -> either intermarrying with them
or conquering them.
647.251 -> So this was the idea
that could somehow explain
650.663 -> why you would find
white tribes in weird areas.
655.353 -> It also happened to fit very nicely
657.664 -> with what was happening
in the late 19th century,
660.644 -> which was new white tribes were taking
over other places in the world.
664.984 -> Europeans were madly scrambling
for colonial possessions
670.072 -> from Asia to Africa.
671.522 -> In fact, this map of Africa
from the late 19th century
674.665 -> shows, essentially, the color codes here
677.562 -> are different color codes
for European countries:
680.182 -> brown is France, green is Great Britain,
blue is Belgium, and purple is Germany.
686.623 -> Literally, all of Africa had been
carved up by European countries
691.514 -> as they tried to grab colonies.
693.514 -> So, the idea that there had been
white ancestors who had done this before
698.171 -> kind of fit the mode
of European thinking at the time,
702.236 -> and as European colonists
came into these parts of Africa,
705.956 -> and they looked at various
groups of Africans, they said,
709.6 -> "These are the Hamites;
these are the proto-white people.
712.73 -> Let's treat them slightly different
714.41 -> than these people that we think of
as being black African."
718.21 -> So, over the course
of the late 19th century,
721.081 -> some groups, like the Bahima,
the Batusi of Rwanda,
726.899 -> the Nyamwezi of Tanzania
were called white,
730.979 -> and other groups were called,
like the Bahutu of Rwanda,
734.069 -> were called black.
735.939 -> Now, at the time,
738.17 -> Africans themselves did not have
the same idea of racial concept, right?
745.029 -> They thought mostly
in terms of ethnic or clan terms,
748.772 -> and yet, these ideas caught on.
751.133 -> And it also allowed Europeans
and North Americans,
753.863 -> when they looked at the great kind of
legacy of African civilizations,
758.073 -> when they looked, for example,
at Great Zimbabwe or the great Pyramids,
761.694 -> they said, "Clearly, black cultures
couldn't have created these.
765.804 -> These must have been the Hamites, right?
768.144 -> Those ancient,
highly advanced white invaders
772.044 -> who were here thousands of years ago.
774.474 -> So this Hamitic hypothesis
776.673 -> became a way of explaining,
justifying, white colonization,
781.223 -> as well as all of this cool stuff
that you find in Africa,
784.963 -> and that was essentially taken away
from Africans themselves.
790.333 -> There is a very dark side
to the Hamitic hypothesis as well,
793.834 -> which is this:
795.037 -> even after Europeans
left Africa in the 1960s
799.267 -> and these countries became independent,
801.747 -> even after the Hamitic hypothesis
804.125 -> essentially was exploded
as not being true,
808.015 -> even after that time
809.435 -> Africans themselves had started
to adapt and adopt the Hamitic hypothesis
815.025 -> as a part of their own history.
816.705 -> So for example, the Batusi of Rwanda
820.415 -> considered themselves
as having an origin outside of Africa,
824.165 -> and other groups in Africa as well.
827.455 -> The Iraqw of Tanzania see themselves
as having a Mediterranean origin,
831.61 -> not an African one.
833.32 -> And this racial conflict
between the two groups
837.09 -> was something that became important
in the Rwandan genocide of 1994.
842.82 -> It was much easier for the Hutu
to see the Batusi as foreign,
847.761 -> as literally non-African invaders
of their own country,
851.155 -> and made it that much easier for them
to exterminate them.
855.148 -> I'm not saying that's the only reason
for the Rwandan genocide,
858.15 -> but it was one of the important factors.
860.07 -> So that's the sad part of the story.
861.99 -> But there's another part
and I want to end on this other part,
864.903 -> which is an interesting part of the story,
866.903 -> which is we really haven't actually gotten
back to the original question,
870.343 -> which was: if these things aren't true,
872.583 -> if Stanley wasn't actually seeing
white people in the heart of Africa,
876.747 -> then what was he seeing?
878.979 -> So I went to Africa in 2013,
882.711 -> and I actually climbed that mountain
that Stanley was looking at,
885.801 -> which I was totally unprepared for.
888.031 -> I mean, I run; I thought
I was in pretty good shape,
891.151 -> but this mountain is 17,000 feet high!
894.791 -> There is a glacier on the top of it,
and I wasn't really prepared for that.
898.489 -> But here I am before I got to that point.
902.25 -> (Laughter)
903.61 -> And I wanted to see, as I told my guide,
I wanted to see what Stanley saw,
907.95 -> and my guide, who was a member
of the Bakonzo tribe, he looked at me
911.45 -> and said: "There's no white people
on the top of that mountain, man."
914.735 -> (Laughter)
915.555 -> And I said, "I know that there aren't."
917.429 -> But I want to think about
what Stanley saw.
919.439 -> I came up with a provisional hypothesis,
and the provisional hypothesis is this:
924.999 -> I think Stanley did see difference;
I think he did look at people and said,
929.093 -> "These people do not look
anything like these people."
932.173 -> We now know that in terms
of human diversity,
934.725 -> Africa is the most diverse
continent in the world.
938.085 -> There's more human diversity,
i.e. physical diversity, in Africa
941.943 -> than any other place
943.223 -> because within Africa is a much longer
evolutionary period of time
947.523 -> for the human species than outside of it.
950.053 -> So I think he did see human difference,
and then it was filtered through -
954.004 -> this is my own theory,
and I'm very proud of it -
956.304 -> it filtered what I call
the Mr. Magoo Hypothesis.
959.659 -> (Laughter)
960.809 -> So for those of you who are too young
to remember Mr. Magoo,
964.643 -> he was this Don Quixote-like figure
966.814 -> who was so nearsighted
that you would stick him in a room,
970.214 -> and he wouldn't really know where he was,
and he thought he was somewhere else,
974.244 -> but everything that he, like,
bumped into or knocked into,
977.144 -> he interpreted as if he
was in that other place
979.998 -> because his expectations
of where he was were so strong
983.918 -> it filtered virtually
all information coming in.
986.958 -> And I think that almost all explorers -
probably all tourists -
991.507 -> suffer from the Mr. Magoo hypothesis,
993.887 -> which is that they too, in a sense,
filter everything they see
997.392 -> through their expectations
of what they should see.
999.792 -> And I think Stanley, in a sense,
1001.835 -> wanted to see people
who were like him, who were European.
1006.035 -> He was a desperately lonely man;
he was living in Africa for three years,
1010.505 -> oftentimes without anyone else
from Europe or North America,
1014.327 -> and I think in a sense,
he wanted to identify with people
1017.708 -> and saw this difference - cheekbones,
aquiline nose, lighter skin color -
1022.777 -> and traced that as white.
1024.745 -> Ultimately, to finish it off, why should
we remember this strange hypothesis?
1029.845 -> OK. It was a kind of inkblot test
for the way people looked at the world.
1033.702 -> But ultimately, I think we should
remember the Hamitic hypothesis
1037.51 -> because when we think about
master races and Aryan domination,
1043.04 -> we think about kind of the very short,
very violent history of Nazi Germany,
1048.721 -> but in fact, there was a much longer
and a much more profound racial theory
1053.221 -> that continues to exist today,
and that is the Hamitic hypothesis.
1056.763 -> Thanks very much.
1058.033 -> (Applause)
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn4bvjMh4vc