Othala and neo-Nazi Migration Fantasies

Internet user  ThoughtfulWitz (@ThoughtfulWitz Sep 4, 2026) with reference to undiscovered archaeology in northern Africa, says:

"Especially when you look at some of the cultures and ethnicities who have inhabited NW Africa since pre-history.. like the ancestors of the Berbers (The Amazigh, etc).. who you’d look at and think were from Europe… similar to the Guanches (the primitive, ancient people who inhabited the Canary Islands and the Azores.. who the Portuguese came in contact with centuries ago, went to war with and eventually enslaved/killed… they mummified their dead, and built pyramids… and they were Tall, Blonde/Red haired people, who also in some cases had tattoos….

They were believed to be survivors of Atlantis.. and the Amazigh as well as the Berbers seem to be the genetic descendants of these people.. it’s fascinating.

I’m wondering if, considering the climate changes, etc.. if these Guanches, are the surviving remnants of a vastly ancient civilization that was wiped out by a cataclysm so brutal, that it separated them from the mainland of Africa.. and the island which they inhabited, were simply the peaks of the mountains of the Atlantic landmass that they lived on for Millenia.

Look into the Guanches and the Amazigh. They’ve been in Africa and the Azores (sic) since before written history.. yet they look almost Germanic or even Celtic."

Good grief. What does "being Germanic" or "being Celtic" look like? There is a fair bit of Ahnenerbe in that. So they "wore tattoos" did they (source?)? Why does his picture show tattoos like the Elder Futhark Ōþala-rune (apparently corresponding to the notion "inheritance, home, native land" in Old English) and much used by the Nazi SS and currently by far-right groups? Instead of going on what they "look like" the typical pseudo-science standby, why not use the actual genetic evidence (conveniently summarised here)?

There is no accepted evidence that the island groups Cape Verde Islands, Madeira and the Azores off the coast of north-western Africa had an indigenous population in the deeper past. Specifically, the Azores, mentioned above, were uninhabited when Portuguese explorers arrived in the 15th century. As any history book would have told Mr Witz before he set out to lecture us all, the bloody conquest and decimation of the Guanche population of the Canary Islands however was not by the Portuguese but was a Spanish/Castilian initiative. 

As for the idea that the Guanche "mummified their dead and built pyramids", Mr Witz has got confused. The Guanches did practice mummification of some of the deceased, preserving bodies with leather and herbs in burial caves. The "pyramids" claim refers to structures like the Pyramids of Güímar in Tenerife. However, mainstream archaeology dates these specific step-stone structures to the 19th century agricultural era, not to the ancient Guanches, though romantic and pseudohistorical theories (promoted by explorers like Thor Heyerdahl) often tied them to the indigenous population and external influences. The mention of tall, blonde / red-haired people with tattoos selectively quotes from earlier accounts but is mixed with fantasy from 19th-century racial mythmaking. Nineteenth and and early twentieth century racial anthropologists had exaggerated these traits to claim the Guanches were a "lost white tribe," attributing Nordic, Cro-Magnon, or Atlantean origins to them. Mr Witz just follows along.

Last Glacial Maximum

Mr Witz also ignores the huge depth of the ocean between the island groups that he idly speculates (but does not fact-check) might have been joined as a larger landmass when the sea level was lower. Reality is more modest. Why do people write such crap without thinking it through first?

The so-called Pyramids of Güímar

The so-called Pyramids of Güímar are a tourist attraction in the southeast of Tenerife (Güímar, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain). The site is a 64,000 m² series of stone-built terraces (now partly destroyed). They seem to be 19th-century agricultural terraces and field walls. They seem to have been formed during the 1800s when local landowners cleared rocks from arable fields to prepare the land for cultivation by piling the stones systematically into structured terraces, a common regional practice known as majanos (but of course terraces appear whenever areas of stony land on hillslopes are cleared for fields). Excavations conducted by the University of La Laguna in the 1990s uncovered 19th-century pottery shards and domestic items buried directly in the soil layers underneath the terraces (Gómez and Mederos 1996).

Some of the terraces have been claimed to have astronomical alignments (Belemonte, Aparicio and Estaban 1993 etc.), but why modern terraces should be aligned this way is not clear. The site was opened to the public in 1998, sponsored by a Norwegian investor, Fred Olsen, who owns the largest ship and ferry company in the Canary Islands.

The famous Norwegian explorer and ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl became fascinated by the site in 1991, when he moved to Tenerife with his third wife (Jacqueline Beer) with whom he became very actively involved with several archaeological projects until his death in 2002 [this was well after his Kon-Tiki stunt (1947), the 1955–1956 expedition to Easter Island and the Ra sailings of the 1970s]. Heyerdahl argued that the structures were meticulously designed step pyramids that shared uncanny structural similarities with ancient temples in Peru, Mexico, and Mesopotamia. He proposed that the Canary Islands served as a crucial geographic stopping point for ancient Mediterranean or African mariners who sailed to the Americas thousands of years before Christopher Columbus. He believed the indigenous Guanches of Tenerife originally constructed the pyramids based on these seafaring connections.

REFERENCES
J. A. Belmonte, A. Aparicio and C. Esteban 1993, 'A solsticial marker in Tenerife: the Majanos de Chacona', in: Archaeoastronomy (supplement of Journal for the History of Astronomy), No. 18.

Antonio Aparicio Juan/César Esteban López 2005, 'Las Pirámides de Güímar: mito y realidad'. Centro de la Cultura Popular Canaria, La Laguna 2005, ISBN 978-84-7926-510-6.

Aparicio, A., Esteban, C. 2015, 'A Modern Myth - The “Pyramids” of Güímar' In: Ruggles, C. (eds) Handbook of Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6141-8_107

Maria Cruz Jiménez Gómez/Juan Francisco Navarro Mederos 1996, 'El complejo de las morras de Chacona (Güímar, Tenerife): resultados del proyecto de investigación', XII Coloquio de Historia Canario-Americana (1996), Cabildo Insular de Gran Canaria, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria 1998, vol. 1.

Italian Self-Delusion, now Nicole Ciccolo Wants to dig up the Giza Plateau.

Official press release of the Khefren project (translation).

.

./

"On August 22, 2026, the Khefren project team officially filed with the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities of the Arab Republic of Egypt the technical documentation relating to the research to be carried out in the Giza Plain area. The filing includes the collection of non-invasive field measurements as well as an official request for excavation permits.

The non-invasive surveys conducted over the last 18 months have revealed density anomalies compatible with structures, including hypogeums of significant archaeological interest. The results were acquired in compliance with the international protocols applicable to UNESCO cultural heritage [meaning unclear - PMB] and will be the subject of scientific publication in the form and timeframe established by the project. Further updates on the Khefren Research Project will be published starting October 1st on Professor Corrado Malanga's official YouTube channel [Corrado Malanga Experience]. The Khefren project does not shy away from any scientific debate; on the contrary, it demands it. Any institution, researcher, or journal wishing to question our data, our methodologies, or our conclusions is invited to do so in the appropriate scientific forums before independent third-party international bodies such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the International Science Council, or bodies of equivalent authority and impartiality. We will be present at every forum for serious, well-documented debate based on the scientific method.

The Khefren Project has acted and will continue to act firmly in every forum and context to assert its rights and guarantee full transparency on the facts. Together with all the aware people of this planet, we will transform objective measures into certainties for humanity. Thank you."

Bonkers. No mention here of any involvement of archaeological bodies. The Chinese Academy has agreed to get involved, what about the Italian one? Instead of submitting a "collection of raw non-invasive field measurements", how about first publishing them as is the usual way of things and subjecting them and the group's analysis (using AI no less) to proper peer review which would help refine the research aims?

"At Ease folks"

 

Twitter soothes, there's no anthropocene at all in the shaping of the global climate, "David" [whose Twitter account reveals to be a rabid hater of Islam] instructs us:  

Do the Younger Dryas Impact Theorists know about this? So where are the effects of their cometary-winter and consequent civilational collapse and great extinctions on this chart? If it happened, its not in this schematic picture of long cycles in ANTARTICA.

This map, that David uses originates from material disseminated by "The CO2 Coalition" (registered address an office suite in Prosperity Ave Fairfax, VA 22031-4968, USA). This is an advocacy organization and non-profit think tank based in Trump's USA that promotes the view that carbon dioxide emissions and fossil fuels are beneficial to the Earth and the economy. It was established in 2015 as a successor organization to the now-defunct George C. Marshall Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank known for casting doubt on mainstream climate science. Its stated mission is use selectively-presented material "to educate policymakers and the public about the positive contributions of carbon dioxide to life and agriculture, arguing against mandated emission reductions and questioning climate models". The organization has received funding from energy industry interests, fossil fuel executives, and conservative foundations that oppose environmental regulations.

The group's membership is listed here (with mugshots)., the ultimate appeal-to-authority. The group's roster includes roughly 200 members, they are overwhelmingly drawn from the engineering field, but also hard sciences (physicists, atmospheric physicists, engineers, meteorologists, and mathematicians together with various researchers who challenge mainstream consensus on human-caused climate change) and the energy sector (including geologists and geophysicists, many of whom have career backgrounds in petroleum, coal, or mineral exploration). Tellingly, there are no professional archaeologists or prehistorians listed among the members or experts of the CO2 Coalition.

Even though they lack specialists in human prehistory or archaeology, the CO2 Coalition frequently publishes material regarding the "prehistoric record". They do this by selecting paleoclimatological data in isolation from the archaeological record of human societies. They often cite periods from millions of years ago (such as the Cambrian or Mesozoic epochs) to argue that something or other thrived on Earth when carbon dioxide levels were thousands of parts per million higher than they are today. I wonder if they'd have liked to have lived a decent civilised life on such a planet.

For example in the landscape of the Jurassic, not a lot of crops can be farmed in these conditions. If we today have problems with urban foxes (and in Warsaw, boars and elk) just imagine a large sauropod rummaging through the rubbish bins. 

The vast majority of climate scientists and major scientific organizations dispute the group's assertions, categorizing its messaging as climate disinformation or denial.

Reuters Fact Check: 'Chart of historical CO2 levels misleading, overlooks human-driven increase' January 2, 2024

Pseudo Blast-Glass from the US

The Geological Society of America will be having a session in Denver Colorado on 'Myths and Misrepresentations surrounding Cosmic Impact claims in Paleoclimatology, Paleontology, Paleoecology, Geoarchaeology, and Quaternary Research' that will look at the evidence for the Younger Dryas Impact Theory (11-14 October 2026). One of the papers is this one presented by Robert Harris (Department of Geology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA; Georgia Space and Rocks (GASPAR), LLC, Loganville, GA, USA): 'A Critical Assessment of Anthropogenic Slags and Petroleum Pyrogenetic Glasses in the Southeastern United States: Petrology and Misidentification as Natural Melts'...

Abstract:
Many of the controversial claims that have been published over the last two decades regarding evidence of impacts or airbursts at the Younger Dryas Boundary have cited and relied upon comparisons to melt breccias collected around Blackville, South Carolina, described by Bunch et al. (PNAS, 2012). As someone acknowledged by those authors as providing “critical” samples (and as a co-author of the Firestone et al. (2007) YDB article), I am uniquely qualified to give testimony that those glasses are slags from an abandoned railroad. The lead authors were aware of the clear evidence of that before publication.

I could argue that to the extent subsequent claims of YDB glasses, and other more recent Holocene samples, convincingly demonstrate similarities to the Blackville slags, those claims of impacts or airbursts that rely on the comparison, properly should be retracted.

Remarkably, many of the Bunch at al. (2012) authors joined with Bindi et al. (2026) seemingly to endorse the conclusion, after fifteen years of saying otherwise, that they are uncertain whether the glasses were, “…produced by natural processes or anthropogenesis.” But how can there can be any doubt when the coordinates of the sample studied by Bindi (2026) map to the center of a railroad berm composed largely of construction aggregate.

No amount of circumspection prevented many of the authors from drawing on Bunch at al. (2012) to make definitive assertions of a YDB impact near Perkins, Louisiana (Fitzenreiter et al., 2025). I was asked by one author to examine samples from the site in advance of publication. My preliminary petrography suggested quench rates slower than those typically observed for small-scale impacts or short-duration airbursts. I reported that they either were anthropogenic or, less likely but plausibly, might be ejecta eroded from older impact strata that do occur up-gradient. However, a subsequent tour of the site and additional samples graciously provided by the lead author, revealed evidence that these glasses are most like those produced by petroleum fires. The Perkins site, in fact, sets in the middle of an area with abundant pimple mounds, which have been linked to gas extrusions.

The Blackville slag finds are at site 7 on this 2019 map of the YDI-sites then known.*

The other material mentioned in this take-down text refers to the study by Fitzenreiter et al. (2025), published in the journal Airbursts and Cratering Impacts, asserts that a shallow seasonal lake/depression near Perkins, Louisiana, is North America’s first identified cosmic airburst crater dating to the Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB). The authors argue that the site preserves physical evidence of a low-altitude "touch-down" cosmic airburst that occurred approximately 12,800 years ago.

 * (Map showing 24 sites containing Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) nanodiamonds. The solid line defines the current known limits of the YDB field of cosmic-impact proxies, spanning 50 million km 2 , including Venezuela (open circle). Numbered sites are from this study: 1) Lake Cuitzeo, Mexico; 2) Daisy Cave, California; 3) Arlington Canyon, California; 4) Murray Springs, Arizona; 5) Lindenmeier, Colorado; 6) Bull Creek, Oklahoma; 7) Blackville, South Carolina; 8) Topper, South Carolina; 9) Kimbel Bay, North Carolina; 10) Newtonville, New Jersey; 11) Melrose, Pennsylvania; 12) Sheriden Cave, Ohio; 13) Gainey, Michigan; 14) Chobot site, Alberta, Canada; 15) Lake Hind, Manitoba, Canada; 16) Kangerlussuaq, Greenland; 17) Watcombe Bottom, Isle of Wight, United Kingdom; 18) Lommel, Belgium; 19) Ommen, Belgium; 20) Lingen, Germany; 21) Santa Maira, Spain; 22) Abu Hureyra, Syria. In addition, independent researchers have reported NDs at six sites, indicated by letters, four of which are in common: a) Indian Creek, Montana; b) Bull Creek, Oklahoma; c) Sheriden Cave, Ohio; d) Newtonville, New Jersey; e) Lommel, Belgium; f) Aalsterhut, Netherlands. Credit to Wittke et al. (2013); Kinzie et al. (2014). [Volker Dietrich])            

Not Before Time: Pyramid Scan Pseudoarchaeology Retraction From Journal of Remote Sensing

Filippo Biondi and Corrado Malanga's bonkers paper "Synthetic Aperture Radar Doppler Tomography Reveals Details of Undiscovered High-Resolution Internal Structure of the Great Pyramid of Giza" has just been retracted from the journal Remote Sensing (Remote Sens. 2022, 14, 5231. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14205231  Published: 19 October 2022). This has been ascribed to an "investigation that confirmed serious methodological flaws and statistical errors that were deemed to undermine the scientific conclusions of the article". In other words, they are going to submit the text to the external editors that will now do what should have been done four years ago, read the work carefully. 

For the record, I am one of several archaeologists who have called out the so-called Khufu Project's methods and questionable formulations repeatedly (on the retracted paper, see here: 'Filippo Biondi, and Corrado Malanga: 'Khufu's Pyramid is Full of Holes and May Have Been a Giant Vibro-Massager' Monday, 27 April 2026), but I never found the time to actually contact the journal and am not the whistleblower [the dozy editors and their peer-reviwers should not have needed one in this case, rather they should resign].*

Nicole Ciccolo walks away from her Khufu Project

* Academic Editors: Rosa Lasaponara, Ilaria Catapano, Luca Piroddi, Sebastiano D’Amico, Marilena Cozzolino, Nasser Abu Zeid, Patrizia Capizzi and Sergio Vincenzo Calcina. Note, ms was received on 30 August 2022, it was already accepted on 12 October 2022, and published a week later, 19 October 2022.

Atlantis Theories Meet Ancient DNA

There is a quite detailed article Atlantis Theories and DNA: What Paleogenetics Excludes (May 27, 2026) on the website of a company 'Explore Your DNA' that seems worthy of attention. This service is provided by Teemu Nätkinniemi, trading as G25Requests, a registered Finnish sole proprietorship business based in Vaasa, SW Finland. The article contains too many details to summarise here, but the conclusion is as follows:

"Conclusion: what paleogenetics excludes
Paleogenetics now allows several precise versions of the Atlantis hypotheses to be excluded. First, it excludes the existence of a pre-Neolithic advanced maritime Atlantic civilization that left demographically traceable descendants: no European or Mediterranean population carries an unexplained ancestral component corresponding to a pre-7000 BCE Atlantic source. Second, it excludes the identification of Tartessos as a genetically distinct civilization: the studied Tartessian individual is a normal local descendant. Third, it excludes the identification of the Minoans as an exotic population: their profile derives cleanly from documented Aegean sources. Fourth, it excludes the identification of Doggerland as a lost civilization: its inhabitants were ordinary Western hunter-gatherers. What paleogenetics cannot exclude is the allegorical interpretation of Plato (which most classical scholars have favored since Antiquity), nor the idea that the Atlantis account reflects, in distorted form, the memory of real natural events (Santorini eruption, Doggerland submersion, Storegga tsunami, decline of Tartessos) that impressed the oral sources transmitted to Plato. Paleogenetics eliminates versions of the hypothesis that assume a distinct demography; it leaves intact the purely cultural, allegorical, or symbolic versions."

Unfortunately this whole exercise has failed to identify at its outset a useful research aim. It asks, in all seriousness, the question whether the population of EUROPE came "from Atlantis". The only bodies of genetic material examined are European. So basically what they are addressing are the very anachronistic views of writers such as Ignatius Donnelly (1831–1901) and Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891) - questions long ago already answered by science. 

Very few later writers are claiming that Europe was colonised by Atlantis. Those that do situate that mythical fantasy-island in Europe, so there were German nationalists such as Albert Hermann (1886–1945) and Dutch-German pseudohistorian Herman Wirth (1885-1981) who linked the process of civilization of Europe with Aryan ("German) colonisers. In more modern times we only have a few devotees of hyperdiffusionism such as Paul Dunbavin ('Atlantis of the West: The Case For Britain's Drowned Megalithic Civilization' 2003), argueing that Atlantis was a large island that once existed in the Irish Sea and that a comet impact caused a pole shift that changed the Earth's axis around 3100 BC and this somehow led to the Neolithic civilization on ythe island being drowned out by rising sea levels and this led to its inhabitants colonising Europe (a sort of a reversed Hancockism). Swedish geographer Dr. Ulf Erlingsson ('Atlantis from a Geographer's Perspective: Mapping the Fairy Land' 2004) proposes that Atlantis had been located in Ireland. None of these ideas are mainstream, even in pseudo-archaeology or pseudo-history circles. So it is not cler what, or who is being "debunked" in this out-of-touch article.

The article does not address Graham Hancock’s influential "Lost Allerød antecedent Civilization" hypothesis, because it merely focuses on Bronze/Iron Age, region-specific theories rather than pre-Younger Dryas (before 10,800 BCE) narratives. To directly address Graham Hancock’s specific hypothesis, a scientific critique or article would have to pivot away from Bronze Age Mediterranean archeology and instead target his specific timelines, mechanisms, and geographic models. To address Hancock’s claims, the article would need to analyze early Palaeolithic genomes on a far wider scale than we see here.

Hancock does not usually argue that an advanced civilization mass-migrated into Europe or the Americas. Instead, he claims a few highly advanced survivors from the collapse of his postlated "Lost Allerød antecedent Civilization"  at the beginning of the Younger Dryas travelled the world to teach local hunter-gatherers agriculture, astronomy, and architecture. What is needed to examine this theory by genetic means is to show the degree of unexplained trace ancestry of 10,000–9,000 BCE populations (like those at Göbekli Tepe or early South American sites)to determine the degree that these populations are descended from known, local Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, or whether there are traces at the time of a social or cultural change of an "introgression" or "founder event" from a mysterious, technologically advanced third party. 

This needs testing for all the global hotspots Hancock highlights (such as Indonesia/Sundaland, the Amazon basin, and southeastern Anatolia). Genetic testing would need to show the degree to which, right before and during the postulated “Younger Dryas cataclysm”, there was sudden, widespread population mixing or genetic bottleneck that would indicate a global maritime network collapsing and dispersing.

Since Hancock implies that (“the idea of”) agriculture was gifted to humanity by this lost civilization after the postulated cataclysm, another approach would be through tracking the genetics of domesticated crops and animals. The paleogenomics of early domesticates (like einkorn wheat in Anatolia or maize ancestors in the Americas) needs to show to what degree the genetic wild-to-domestic transition in these plants happened gradually over thousands of years via local gathering, as opposed to the degree to which it shows a sudden, genetically engineered, or fully "pre-developed" introduction from an unknown botanical source.

Hancock has argued that his postulated “lost civilization” is today lost to sight because it flourished on landmasses that are now underwater due to post-glacial sea-level rise (like the drowned continent of Sundaland in Southeast Asia) or shifted by crustal displacement (Antarctica). A critique would need to look at the genetics of pre- and post- Younger Dryas populations living on the edges of these regions (e.g., modern and ancient genomic data from maritime Southeast Asia, Australia, and southernmost South America). This would show the degree to which these populations lack any shared, highly distinct "ghost" DNA component that would link them to a singular, central, highly developed maritime empire that sunk beneath the waves.