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"A major focus of the astrobiology program is to try to figure out what path life might have taken on some other world besides Earth," he said "There are people that make the argument that it would be likely to have taken a similar trajectory. You have to have some kind of energetic source for organisms to live on and certainly sunlight is one of the most likely options, since it's a high quality flow of energy. Now we have a picture of how life has developed that source on our planet."
Arizona State University
The early history of Mesoamerican studies is characterized by a grave dispute over the origins of Mesoamerican civilization. In many ways, this dispute is an argument over two lost continents, Atlantis and Mu, and where their survivors may have settled. Proponents of the Atlantis hypothesis argued that survivors of that lost continent spread to Africa and to Central America, giving rise to advanced civilizations like Egypt and the Maya (Orser 2001), while followers of Mu claimed that refugees from the lost Pacific continent ventured to China and Central America, giving rise to advanced civilizations (Tompkins 1976). That Mesoamerican civilization began in situ is never contemplated.
The two leading advocates of their respective theories were Ignatius Donnelly and Col. James Churchward. According to Prof. Charles Orser (2001) Donnelly, a former vice-presidential candidate, built upon the myth of Atlantis laid down by Plato and created a vision of the island-continent that would last for a century after his book, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World ceased to be remembered: "It is, quite simply, the most significant pseudo-archaeology book ever written, and it has provided a roadmap for the flood of pseudo-archaeology that has come after it [Orser 2001]."
On the other end of the spectrum, Col. Churchward believed in an island civilization located in the Pacific Ocean, whose remains he believed can still be seen in the cyclopean ruins of the Polynesian islands, most notably the statues of Easter Island. Alternative historian Peter Tompkins (1976:364) says that Churchward's Mu was the origin of civilization with "one branch of colonization [which] ran from Mu to Central America, thence to Atlantis." In this scheme, civilization arrived in ancient Mesoamerica by a Pacific route, and Atlantis is downgraded to a colony of the greater Mu.
The conflict among these pre-modern diffusionist theories would lead generations of diffusionists to claim external origins for Mesoamerican civilization, much to the dismay of archaeologists, who tried to stop the robbing of indigenous cultures (see Haslip-Viera et al. 1997).
THE ATLANTIC CROSSING HYPOTHESIS
Donnelly placed Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean and had its descendants populate the Atlantic rim, bringing culture to the ignorant natives after the fall of the great island. This theory was eagerly adopted among the diffusionists of the nineteenth century because, as Tompkins (1976:36) recounts, "the similarity between Mexican and Egyptian pyramids, hieroglyphs, and calendars was too strongly indicative of the existence in the Atlantic of an intervening continent or group of islands, for which Plato's account of Atlantis fit the bill." Of course, having the side-effect of denying the native peoples a culture on par with that of the Europeans did nothing to retard the spread of diffusionism.
After the twentieth century rejection of the Atlantis hypothesis, speculation transformed the Atlantis hypothesis into transoceanic contact. However, even under this scenario, the connection is tenuous at best. The Egyptian and Mesoamerican pyramids bear no relation to each other in either form or function. As Haslip-Viera, Montellano and Barbour (1997:427) point out, the Mexican pyramids were step-pyramids with wide, accessible stairs topped with temples while the Egyptian were regular pyramids with no access or temple-top. Furthermore, if the Egyptians did come to the New World, why should they have taught the Olmec of 1500 BC the pyramid-building techniques they themselves had stopped using hundreds of years earlier?
The same year that Tompkins wrote his alternative history of Mexican pyramid investigation, another researcher was using the old nineteenth century theories to formulate a different view
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