Trans-cultural Diffusion - Hyperdiffusionism

Hyperdiffusionism

Hyperdiffusionists deny that parallel evolution or independent invention took place to any great extent throughout history, they claim that all major inventions and all cultures can be traced back to a single culture.

Early theories of hyperdiffusionism can be traced back to ideas about South America being the origin of mankind. Antonio de León Pinelo, a Spaniard who settled in Bolivia, claimed in his book Paraíso en al Nuevo Mundo that the Garden of Eden and the creation of man had occurred in Bolivia and that the rest of the world was populated by migrations from there. Similar ideas were also held by Emeterio Villamil de Rada, in his book La Lengua de Adán he attempted to prove that Aymara was the original language of mankind and that humanity had originated in Sorata in the Bolivian Andes. The first scientific defence of humanity originating in South America came from the Argentine paleontologist Florentino Ameghino in 1880. Ameghino published his research in a book titled La antigüedad del hombre en el Plata.

There was a revival of hyperdiffusionism in 1911 with the work of Grafton Elliot Smith who asserted that copper spread from Egypt to the rest of the world along with megalithic culture. Smith had claimed that all major inventions had been made by the ancient Egyptians and were carried to the rest of the world by migrants and voyagers. His views became known as "Egyptocentric-Hyperdiffusionism". William James Perry elaborated on the hyperdiffusionist ideas of Smith by using ethnographic data. Another hyperdiffusionist was Lord Raglan in his book How Came Civilization (1939) he wrote that instead of Egypt all culture and civilization had come from Mesopotamia. Hyperdiffusionism after this did not entirely disappear, but it was generally abandoned by mainstream academia.