Antarctica. The Mystery of the Terra Australis

1. What is the key concept behind your belief in the Homo Antartico?

The first reference was the extraordinary work of Professor Roberto Rengifo who in 1921 published his essay Los chiles (“The Chiles”) where he started the Antarctic origin of civilization. However, I must say that my research allowed me to understand that in fact it was in 1919 when Rengifo originally announced that the origin of mankind was in the Antarctic polar land.

It should be added that Rengifo’s vision of the origin of man, his migration from south to north in the Americas and the development of civilization has resonances with the investigations of ethnologist and explorer Francisco P. Moreno about the origin of mankind in the primal American-Antarctic region. It is the Patagonian Zoogenic Nucleus that motivated French anthropologist Pierre Paul Broca to declare if the “light on the origins” is not to be sought in the New World instead of in the Old and also anthropologist Paul Topinard to point out that it is as if to wonder if the Neanderthal would not be accidental in Europe in the Quaternary time and if his real homeland would not be southern South America.

According to Rengifo Antarctica was the great center of white and fair skinned humankind.

Now, while it is a possibility that Professor Rengifo could have based part of his idea on the Antarctic Origin of Mankind in the studies of Francisco P. Moreno that was presented in the Argentine Scientific Society –which had its counterpart in Santiago de Chile, the Société Scientifique du Chili– and in the works of authors such as John Dalton Hooker, Rengifo however quotes only and significantly La Araucana from the soldier and chronicler Alonso de Ercilla and Zúñiga –its three parts were published respectively in 1569, 1578 and 1589 in Madrid– who gives account in the following verses of:

Chile, fertile province and designated,

in the famous Antarctic region,

from remote respected nations,

however strong, principal and powerful.

Ercilla and Zúñiga stipulate at least partially certain acquaintance of the Antarctic continent. And this which may be considered inappropriate in the orthodox historiographic conception, is simply not, as the proof of the knowledge of the Antarctic polar land –of the famous Antarctic region– is found in the impossible maps of Francesco Rosselli (1508-1521), Piri Reis (1513), Lopo Homem (1519), Orontius Finaeus (1531), Gerard de Jode (1593), Matthias Quad (1600) and Phillippe Buache (1754) –among others–, maps that present a polar continent although according to historical annals Antarctica was first spotted in 1799 by John Cook or by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev in 1820 or a year later by John Davis.

Left: The Orontius Finaeus map of 1531 where Antarctica appears, that is, the Terra Avstralis of the European cartographic tradition. Right: The map Typvs Orbis Terrarvm of Abraham Ortelius appeared in 1570 where a large continental mass appears in the South Pole.