"Dumpster fire" is surely one of the more over-used phrases of 2016. I'm going to throw some more garbage in and use it one more time:
Species with Amnesia by Robert Sepher (2015) is the literary equivalent of a dumpster fire.
My students and I read this book as part of the section on Ice Age Civilization in my Forbidden Archaeology class this semester. I chose the book because it checked the boxes for many of the issues that I wanted to address, and I could find no existing, detailed, online appraisal of it. As I read the book, I made of list of claims that I thought would be good for the students to evaluate (and I also found many instances of plagiarism without really trying). I ended up with far more topics than students, so I just picked some of Sepehr's bolder proclamations and handed them out.
It's hard to know where to even start with this thing, so we'll start at the very beginning (a very fine place to start).
Species with Amnesia by Robert Sepher (2015) is the literary equivalent of a dumpster fire.
My students and I read this book as part of the section on Ice Age Civilization in my Forbidden Archaeology class this semester. I chose the book because it checked the boxes for many of the issues that I wanted to address, and I could find no existing, detailed, online appraisal of it. As I read the book, I made of list of claims that I thought would be good for the students to evaluate (and I also found many instances of plagiarism without really trying). I ended up with far more topics than students, so I just picked some of Sepehr's bolder proclamations and handed them out.
It's hard to know where to even start with this thing, so we'll start at the very beginning (a very fine place to start).
Sepehr begins his 143-page attack on facts and logic by trying to discredit paleoanthropology and the study of human evolution. He has to, because his fantasy argument about an ancient super race of white Atlanteans depends on all that fossil evidence from Africa being grossly misinterpreted and the entire body of knowledge about human origins (except for outdated racist ideas about Cro-Magnon) being wrong. As discussed in this blog post, Sepehr focuses on the fraudulent Piltdown skull as evidence that science can get things wrong (duh) and then misunderstands the Lucy fossil and misrepresents Owen Lovejoy. To anyone familiar with the fossil evidence for hominin evolution, the first chapter is ridiculous.
And it only gets worse from there.
In the second chapter, Sepehr introduces the idea that "race" and "species" are equivalent and that human "races" are actually separate species. This isn't Sepehr's original thought, of course, but one handed down from the slavers and Nazis of the last centuries. Anticipating the argument that "species can't interbreed, therefore races are not species," Sepehr provides examples of inter-breeding among different animal species. He claims that it was race-mixing that diluted the superior genes of the Atlanteans and doomed their society.
Take a wild guess what "race" those Atlanteans were? A huge shock: they were tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed Aryans. Sepehr tries to link multiple exoduses from Atlantis to the succession of technological/chronological periods used to describe Upper Paleolithic Europe, focusing on the "Cro-Magnon" peoples of Europe as original emigres from Atlantis 40,000 years ago. Unsurprisingly, he describes Cro-Magnon as tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed people with high frequencies of RH- blood. None of those claims is supported by evidence. His identification of "Cro-Magnon" with "Nordic/Aryan" is not supported by any real data, and his assertions about the genetics of Cro-Magnon remaining unchanged for 28,000 contradicts things he says later in the book (about the evolution of blue eyes, for example, which only evolved 10,000-6,000 years ago).
Sepehr selectively uses an old literature to support his claim that Cro-Magnon spread into Europe from west to east, which is what one would expect if they came from a continent in the Atlantic. Modern data show, however, that the Aurignacian technology that was probably associated with the earliest anatomically modern humans in Europe actually spread from east to west, not west to east. The most recent Neanderthal remains are found in Iberia, consistent with modern human populations coming in from the other direction.
In order to try to make his Cro-Magnons more like what we'd expect "advanced" Atlanteans to be like, Sepehr attributes to them advanced astronomical knowledge (based on Paleolithic cave art). He also claims that Cro-Magnon peoples had agriculture, correctly noting (page 49) that "without agriculture, Atlantis, or any other antediluvian civilization, is no more than a myth." He asserts that Cro-Magnon domesticated the horse, but the student who was assigned that topic didn't turn in his work.
Sepehr blames rising sea levels at the end of the Ice Age for sinking Atlantis, stating that sea levels 400 feet lower would have exposed a large landmass in the middle of the Atlantic. Yeah, right.
Sepehr attempts to identify traces of an advanced global culture run by white-skinned, blue-eyed people, tapping a lot of the usual suspects in the process. He goes over the familiar ground of misunderstanding Haplogroup X and advocating for the presence of Ice Age Europeans in the New World, wrongfully identifying indigenous Chilean peoples as having "Aryan" features, attributing the features of the Guanche of the Canary Islands to Atlantean heritage, and finding blue-eyed people in the New World and China.
And, of course, what ancient Aryan adventure would be complete without finding a few out-of-place swastikas around the world to tie the whole fantasy together.
And near the end, just to make sure the reader is thoroughly impressed by inconsistencies and lack of logic, he claims that Aryan Phoenicians brought agriculture to the New World in 1500 BC.
But wait . . . didn't you say that the original refugees of Atlantis had agriculture in 40,000 BC? And that Atlanteans had colonized North and South America by the end of the Ice Age? Because they had blue eyes? And Haplogroup X? But we know that the domestication of maize actually
Oh never mind. Just light the whole thing on fire.
It is fitting that the book ends with a typo:
"Whatever the cause of these periodic cataclysms on earth, it is clear is that there was a massive even that separates the Pleistocene (ice age) from our current Holocene age roughly 11,500 years ago. Rapidly melting ice caps caused a global rise in sea levels, submerging island and coastal communities world wide. Once we confront this, we may discover our historic cradle of civilization was never out-of-Africa, but out-of-Aftantis."
And it only gets worse from there.
In the second chapter, Sepehr introduces the idea that "race" and "species" are equivalent and that human "races" are actually separate species. This isn't Sepehr's original thought, of course, but one handed down from the slavers and Nazis of the last centuries. Anticipating the argument that "species can't interbreed, therefore races are not species," Sepehr provides examples of inter-breeding among different animal species. He claims that it was race-mixing that diluted the superior genes of the Atlanteans and doomed their society.
Take a wild guess what "race" those Atlanteans were? A huge shock: they were tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed Aryans. Sepehr tries to link multiple exoduses from Atlantis to the succession of technological/chronological periods used to describe Upper Paleolithic Europe, focusing on the "Cro-Magnon" peoples of Europe as original emigres from Atlantis 40,000 years ago. Unsurprisingly, he describes Cro-Magnon as tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed people with high frequencies of RH- blood. None of those claims is supported by evidence. His identification of "Cro-Magnon" with "Nordic/Aryan" is not supported by any real data, and his assertions about the genetics of Cro-Magnon remaining unchanged for 28,000 contradicts things he says later in the book (about the evolution of blue eyes, for example, which only evolved 10,000-6,000 years ago).
Sepehr selectively uses an old literature to support his claim that Cro-Magnon spread into Europe from west to east, which is what one would expect if they came from a continent in the Atlantic. Modern data show, however, that the Aurignacian technology that was probably associated with the earliest anatomically modern humans in Europe actually spread from east to west, not west to east. The most recent Neanderthal remains are found in Iberia, consistent with modern human populations coming in from the other direction.
In order to try to make his Cro-Magnons more like what we'd expect "advanced" Atlanteans to be like, Sepehr attributes to them advanced astronomical knowledge (based on Paleolithic cave art). He also claims that Cro-Magnon peoples had agriculture, correctly noting (page 49) that "without agriculture, Atlantis, or any other antediluvian civilization, is no more than a myth." He asserts that Cro-Magnon domesticated the horse, but the student who was assigned that topic didn't turn in his work.
Sepehr blames rising sea levels at the end of the Ice Age for sinking Atlantis, stating that sea levels 400 feet lower would have exposed a large landmass in the middle of the Atlantic. Yeah, right.
Sepehr attempts to identify traces of an advanced global culture run by white-skinned, blue-eyed people, tapping a lot of the usual suspects in the process. He goes over the familiar ground of misunderstanding Haplogroup X and advocating for the presence of Ice Age Europeans in the New World, wrongfully identifying indigenous Chilean peoples as having "Aryan" features, attributing the features of the Guanche of the Canary Islands to Atlantean heritage, and finding blue-eyed people in the New World and China.
And, of course, what ancient Aryan adventure would be complete without finding a few out-of-place swastikas around the world to tie the whole fantasy together.
And near the end, just to make sure the reader is thoroughly impressed by inconsistencies and lack of logic, he claims that Aryan Phoenicians brought agriculture to the New World in 1500 BC.
But wait . . . didn't you say that the original refugees of Atlantis had agriculture in 40,000 BC? And that Atlanteans had colonized North and South America by the end of the Ice Age? Because they had blue eyes? And Haplogroup X? But we know that the domestication of maize actually
Oh never mind. Just light the whole thing on fire.
It is fitting that the book ends with a typo:
"Whatever the cause of these periodic cataclysms on earth, it is clear is that there was a massive even that separates the Pleistocene (ice age) from our current Holocene age roughly 11,500 years ago. Rapidly melting ice caps caused a global rise in sea levels, submerging island and coastal communities world wide. Once we confront this, we may discover our historic cradle of civilization was never out-of-Africa, but out-of-Aftantis."
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