Bad History - Paradise Found by William Warren

there are notable themes in pseudo history things that have been proposed by so many authors it almost becomes a genre of pseudo history the series is only on episode 5 and I've already had two videos involving fake Eurasian discoveries of the Americas before Columbus there are other genres such as the this guy never existed revisionism and the everything before ye rex was made up genre known as alternative chronologies but this video is going to focus on another genre the genre I like to call the people actually came from this place genre a pseudo history that reaches to the beginning of human history like literally the first humans that existed history pseudo history can also cross over into other pseudo subjects it happens all the time in past episodes I've mentioned a few examples of mythology pseudoscience pseudo archeology and falsified evidence that have been used to justify some false theories it's easy for them to cross over because after all history is about the chronology of existence or if you want to limit it at least the chronology of humanity this includes things like the origin of humanity itself which mixes into science culture which of course can include archeology religion or mythology as historians and paleontologists actively learned about our past we debate over the origin of humanity itself the set of beliefs on where the first human itself or the first example of human society emerged have changed over time as we discover newer information and this is fine that's how it's supposed to work you use the evidence available to establish the theory and if there's newly discovered evidence that predates yours then you move on for example modern humans or Homo sapiens are said to have originated out of Eastern Africa but some findings in northwestern Africa may end up changing this perhaps East Africa was merely the first step out of West Africa maybe they're even older fossils in East Africa that make the West African ones irrelevant you never know there is also the study of origins of the civilization or culture for example maybe the people of X migrated to their modern home from somewhere else Aztecs came to Mexico from modern-day Arizona the hungarians arrived from the Eurasian steps there are plenty of examples of this sort of thing so sometimes there are theories that perhaps a group of people came from some warehouse the subject of human origin itself or the origins of the civilization or culture is by no means a taboo topic in science or history this is relevant to point out because the common assertion by sudha historians or pseudo scientists is that somehow they're being suppressed for exposing the truth by talking about subjects academia doesn't want you to talk about but it's honestly not true historians won't care if you have a theory as long as you actually have evidence and art just claiming that everyone beside you is wrong heck many pseudo historians will find a way to publish their material and unfortunately will get an audience but then when historians point out they have faulty or made-up evidence they'll claim it's the suppressive conspiracy for this episode we are going to talk about William Warren a theologist and pseudo historian who published Paradise found the cradle of the human race at the North Pole a study of the primitive world that's right this man published a book claiming that humanity began at the North Pole and this book has over 500 pages so this should be good but first let's learn a bit more about William Warren himself Warren was born in 1833 and from the u.s. state of Massachusetts he graduated from Wesleyan University in Middletown Connecticut at the age of 20 and also studied abroad in Germany for a time before taking a professorship and then Presidency of both the Boston University School theology for seven years and then Boston University itself for 30 years he would make several works on history and theology and was considered quite a prestigious individual however a paradise found was his attempt to promote a theory of his that humanity's origins were at the North Pole in 1885 he published it for the world to read and as you could probably guess it wasn't well researched even if it was well intentioned as mentioned earlier student history can crossover with other pseudo subjects and this book has bits of both pseudoscience and pseudo history I'm going to try to mostly talk about the pseudo history but some of the pseudo scientific stuff is a bit hard to ignore and also mentions religion and talks about the Garden of Eden I don't want to get into a huge debate on whether religious story should be mixed with the study of history or discuss whether holy texts should be can literally metaphorically or whatever but regardless in part one of the book he examines people who thought the Garden of Eden was real people who thought it was metaphorical and people who were just looking for the origin of humanity outside of the Garden of Eden chapter one opens with perhaps one of the most laughably ironic sentences in hindsight one of the most interesting and pathetic passages to be found in all of literature is that in which Christopher Columbus announces to his royal patrons his suppose the discovery of the ascent to the gate of the long-lost Garden of Eden so he's mocking Christopher Columbus for misallocating the route to the Garden of Eden just right away this book is broken up into parts with individual chapters and part one has three chapters on temps by past historical figures theologians and scientists and their attempts to find the Garden of Eden or the origin of humanity Warren himself proposed that the Garden of Eden was real but that translation errors have resulted in the location being harder to find than at first glance for example the Bible mentions the Garden of Eden having four rivers and two of those are the Tigris and Euphrates rivers but Warren claims that there were multiple rivers on multiple continents called the Euphrates River by locals at various times so it's possible perhaps it's not located in Mesopotamia like it implies and suggests that perhaps they're not supposed to be Grand rivers but may be mountain streams or something on a smaller scale he concludes part one by saying paradise was indeed lost and the answer has yet to be found by either religion or science whether the Garden of Eden or any sort of cradle of humanity part two is when he decides to address how he plans to examine his own theory Warren claims to be surprised that no one has suggested the hypothesis of the North Pole or rather a former land up in the North Pole that has since submerged he at least wants to look at it from a scientific perspective and back it with some facts but it's gonna be hard to find evidence that doesn't exist so let's see what Warren does part three opens rather interestingly by saying the reason the theory hasn't been taken seriously before is that there's an assumption that the North Pole was always cold I mean how silly especially considering we all know the earth is cooling yeah yeah I know this is once again as hilarious in hindsight considering current events but Warren claims that since the earth started molten hot and ended up where it's at it has obviously been continually cooling and since the North Pole's the furthest distance from the Sun it was the first place to cool down to a temperature necessary for human life of course temperatures on the planet have had warming and cooling periods but it wasn't a continuous single cooling certainly not to mention there's no sunken landmass below the North Pole it's only ice even if we account for something like continental drift theory you know like the Pangaea thing humanity's appearance wasn't that far back it wasn't far back enough to where it would have made any difference in where the continents were continental drift theory and concepts like Pangaea were however a 20th century theory and discovery so to be fair to Warren he wouldn't have known about that he mentions that they know that areas north of Europe have submerged land and that's true to the extent that the coastline used to extend further at different times of continental drift and the levels of oceans just not a whole continent in the modern day North Pole regardless he claims that not only was the North Pole the first spot to have humans the claim that the North Pole was therefore the origin of all modern plants and animals Warren then questions the gall of the scientists who apparently all agree that animals and plants originated in the North Pole but ignored the obvious implication that humanity began there too it doesn't make sense that just because the North Pole would technically cool down first then life would start there especially since life arose from the oceans not the land another major problem is that ease attributing common agreement in the field but only vaguely referencing one or two scientists just because a couple of scientists have a theory doesn't mean that the entire field is in agreement why he is really jumping the gun here and I know that not every theory is believed by every scientist but if you're going to act like that the field agrees with it it should at least be a majority however part four of the book is when we leave the realm of pseudoscience and enter more true pseudo history Warren now attempts to try and find evidence of his theory within human cultural Heritage's he starts with referencing the mythologies of ancient Babylon Assyria China India and so on and how they mentioned northern mountains that how some of their gods he uses that to conclude that since a lot of ancient cultures had this trope and that the Garden of Eden may have been a mountain that means their culture was aware of their north pole origins or at least helped confirm the theory there are many problems with assuming that tropes exist for a reason and they don't guarantee a common origin nearly every mythology around the world will reference things like floods fires gods living somewhere big and faraway wars it's a very lazy way to try to validate a theory he's further making mountains out of mole hills here when examining mythologies and culture by asking a person's take on a mythological story and using that as evidence for north pole Eden he also claims that in ancient Greece this suppose the north pole continent was what they refer to as Atlantis because if you're making pseudo history you have to bring up Atlantis at some point Warren claims that since Atlantis and mythology belong to the mythological Titan atlas then that's clear evidence Atlantis was the North Pole because he claimed ancient Greeks believed Atlas ballooned in the North Pole that isn't true in Hesiod's Theogony an eighth century BC poem that discusses many Greek myths including the oldest known stories about the Titans Atlas was said to have actually held the world on his shoulders in the Far West not the north but Warren gist quotes a writer saying well I go so anything's possible which yes it's technically true when dealing with an imaginary place that the original writer plano was using as a fictitious and allegorical place to begin with it almost seems silly to argue over mythology in a book that's supposed to be about history and science but if he's going to bring up mythology he should at least be able to know the source material and when Warren concludes the part by proclaiming that their hypothesis was airtight and facts in the conclusive answer in the light of all of this oversimplification it's kind of baffling anyone took this seriously at another point he discusses the concept of the navel of the earth also known as the axis mundi point in which the earth revolves around he points out how in local ancient mythologies they claimed that their culture originated from an area they considered the navel of the earth we're the center of the world since the North Pole is literally the axis upon which the earth spins then clearly that means they originated at the North Pole so a culture that claimed to have originated from what they called the center of the earth originated from what we would consider the top of the world that's uh that's something but the book takes a much darker turn in the late 1800s with the advent of Darwinism and the Origin of Species some people came up with theories that claimed Darwinism applied to human groups unfortunately they tended to focus on race and ethnicity a lot and one of the theories at the time many Westerners held was the idea that people they considered savage were going to die out Darwinist style because they weren't at the same standards they were worn claims that because these ancient religions and cultures believed in a similar origin at least one he claimed they believed in then they must have once been monotheistic having left the landmass at the North Pole believed to be the Garden of Eden but over time they changed to what they were and he then says that modern societies with polytheistic beliefs are dying out and that somehow this is what Darwinist should agree with him on to validate his claims of course when you accurately study history you know that Europe conquering most of the world is a complicated subject but there were certainly no divine providence or social Darwinist philosophy and magically made Europe the lucky chosen continent cultures have different ideas on what constitutes civilized barbaric and things that are necessary to prosper or to be happy with as a result surprisingly cultures are different from other cultures what a shocker like I mentioned earlier I don't want to debate religious beliefs than how valid they are when working with history but if you're using your religious beliefs as a framework for your work and say that non Abrahamic cultures descended upon savagery compared to early man then you're not just conducting pseudo history or pseudo science you're adding bias to the work which is a problem it doesn't help that keeper at the beginning he would use a framework of scientific and historical evidence to try and prove his claims but then didn't do as good of a job as he thought he did while it is probable the first humans evolved from an original location and that seems to be the prevailing theory we know that now through discovered fossils and if something different shows up will adjust accordingly regardless it certainly wasn't a non-existent continent at the North Pole so what happened after the book was published it wasn't the most popular book in the world but it certainly was received warmly by many at the time and for a brief while it also inspired many people to try to find the Garden of Eden in the same way that people were looking for something like El Dorado but as time went on and we discovered more things about early man and the North Pole we then knew better in 1909 the first claimed expedition to the North Pole occurred I say claimed because there's actually a bit of dispute on who got there first but regardless we went to the North Pole in the early 1900s and since then we discovered that shocker it is indeed only ice and nothing more plus again we've also had advances in paleontology knowledge in continental drift and so on things that have firmly disproven the possibility of the continent existing here William Warren still believed in his work and the 1921 claim that the North Pole had moved across the entire planet in the past twenty five thousand years so Eden would actually be at a different spot but still a North Pole for the time so he's still right while Warren would die in 1929 still believing what he believed I don't think that Warren was trying to be malicious or to trick people or anything like that he seemed genuine and what he believed and a lot of the prejudices he mentioned in the book were unfortunately seen as normal at the time but that doesn't mean his work wasn't bad history I'm in for Tiger star and I'll see you guys next time thanks for watching I know that this one delved into culture and science more than what we would consider traditional history but I thought that this book was notable enough to do a video on in the meantime if you want to support this channel and see future bad histories you can do so with my patreon link in the description you [Music]

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Views: 50,238

Rating: 4.903965 out of 5

Keywords: history, geography, debunk, North Pole, Arctic, Europe, Asia, North America, 19th century, book, mythology, greece, assyria, babylon, japan, mesopotamia, eden

Id: DH6Q2t7jP-8

Length: 15min 10sec (910 seconds)

Published: Fri May 22 2020