The public is generally unaware of the rancorous disputes that populate academia, diffusionism being one of the nastiest. Diffusionism is basically the anthropological theory that ancient cultures extended their influence and carried on trade across open oceans. This is but one of a host of oppressive and lying social engineering pillars that can be found also in physics (gravity as "fabric" of univers, solar "wind" is not plasma current), astronomy (planet are formed by disk accretion; black hole, big bang, dark matter are not the result of GIGO modeling), psychology (behaviorism is therapeutic, characterological determinants are genetic), liguistics (language independent of cultural evolution potential), genetics (acquired characteristics or learned behavior cannot become genetic), anthropology (mythology cannot reflect historic events), ad nauseum.
For some reason, any attempt to make diffusionism part of the fabric of anthropology or archaeology is met with ridicule, villification and career sabotage. Barry Fell and Thor Heyerdahl's theories are NOT welcome in mainstream academic jounals, which is why he went to consumer publication with his work.
My take is that the reason diffusionism is considered heresy is a) It implies that cultures of the dawn of civilization didn't have the smarts to navigate large stretches of open ocean, b) The great civilizations extended their influence via conquest rather than trade or active colonization, c) Civilizations evolved slowly via internal means rather than rapidly via cross fertilization of ideas d) Religious and Cultural ideas were home grown rather than disseminated.
A liberal socialist academia would want our notion of history to reject and civilizing influence that is not socialist in origin, ie commerce and evangelization are ligitimized in their minds only as coercive, warlike and unwelcome concepts.
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walter alter artist - wiseguy - savant
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I think I would put these two gentlemen into separate groups.
I might add Erich von Daniken to Barry Fell's side though.