Were Bananas Genetically Engineered in Atlantis?

Bananas may be the most perfect food on Earth: nutritious, delicious, and conveniently packaged, one might think they were manufactured for human consumption.

The term “genetically modified food” brings to mind high tech laboratories concocting technologically advanced frankenfoods; yet humans have been modifying crops for thousands of years using much slower methods of gradual breeding. Modern bananas are certainly a unique design; seedless fruits do not occur in nature, yet the banana predates other seedless agricultural products by centuries. Without seeds, banana trees require human participation to reproduce.

Bananas are one of the most nutritionally complete natural foods; you can subsist entirely on an all-banana diet for periods of time. The peels are highly protective of the delicate fruit, yet easy for human hands to remove; they can even be deployed as a weapon in certain circumstances.

While it is possible that bananas could have evolved alongside man to attain these ideal properties, the fact that they seem to have been cultivated in this way on different continents makes that story less likely. All of this strangeness has lead to a number of alternative theories: Creationists have argued that the banana is proof of God’s intelligent design- citing the natural fit of the banana in the human hand in addition to points already mentioned.

Ancient alien theorist Erich Van Danniken unsurprisingly claims the yellow fruit was a gift from the extraterrestrials. David Childress, another ancient alien scholar with a broader interest in alternative history, has argued that the banana must have been the product of an ancient genetic engineering program.

However, the source of all these theories actually dates back over 100 years- to a more specific origin story, which says the banana was originally cultivated on the lost continent of Atlantis.

This first written account of the Atlantian Banana theory comes from Ignatius Donnelly, an author, amateur scientist, and US Congressman. His most popular work, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, originally published in 1882, is widely credited with initiating the belief that Atlantis was a legitimate civilization.

The first written accounts of Atlantis come from Plato. However, in the original writings, it is not clear whether he was constructing an allegory or recounting an historical account. Most historians have interpreted this story metaphorically, but Donnelly asked what might be revealed by reading Plato’s tale of Atlantis as historical fact. By cross-referencing Plato’s details with the more ambiguous aspects of human history, Donnelly extrapolated a global civilization, citing evidence of far-ancient technology around the world.

Some of his more compelling points of emphasis are the relatively sudden emergence of Egyptian culture, which according to him was a presumptive Atlantian colony. Donnelly also emphasized the almost identical emergence of the Mayan civilization, highlighting the uncanny, unexplained connections between the two ancient cultures. Graham Hancock’s book Fingerprints of the Gods examines many of these same connections, and draws similar conclusions, suggesting a lost, ancient civilization as the best explanation for these synchronicities in language and technology on distant continents. The genetically-modified banana, purportedly passed down by the Atlanteans, is one such piece of technological residue from this lost civilization.

However, Donnelly himself could not lay claim to this discovery; he credited the research to a distinguished German botanist, Otto Kuntze. Having spent much time studying tropical plants around the world, Kuntze could not explain the staggering similarities between certain American and Asian trees, specifically the plantain.

This seedless tree required many generations of continuous cultivation to lose its seeds, and for Kuntze, the odds of this cultivation occurring simultaneously on two different continents were too astronomical to be possible: “possessing no easily transportable bulbs, like the potato or the dahlia, nor propagable by cuttings, like the willow or the poplar… (the plantain) has only a perennial root, which, once planted, needs hardly any care.”

Kuntze argues that the roots must have been transported across the ocean by civilized people, and furthermore, insists that the world climate must have been warmer at the time to keep the plants alive across the chilly Pacific ocean. His belief is that this migration must have occurred when the North Pole had a tropical climate.

As Donnelly wrote: “Is there any proof that civilized man existed at the North Pole when it possessed the climate of Africa? Is it not more reasonable to suppose that the plantain, or banana, was cultivated by the people of Atlantis, and carried by their civilized agricultural colonies to the east and the west?”

Fast forward to the present day, and somewhere along the line, the Creationists and Ancient Alien theorists have confused the botanical history of the plantain with the Cavendish banana. Unfortunately for alternative theorists, the historical narrative of this common sweet fruit is well documented. These plants were in fact brought to the American continent by European explorers,and the mystery about their seedless nature really isn’t a mystery at all. In fact, you can still find the wild, seeded ancestors of the Cavendish banana in jungles today.

Perhaps the ancient alien theorists were influenced by the suggestive “out of this world” Chiquita advertisements they encountered at an impressionable age. However, the global cultivation of the plantain, as cited in the Atlantis theory by Otto Kuntze, remains a mystery.

Very little is known about the ancient history of plantains, but it does appear as if they have proliferated in tropical regions around the globe with no known point of origin. While the genetic modification of its sweeter cousins is fairly well-documented, the more savory plantain lacks a compelling story for its similarly miraculous traits, especially when one considers the diverse regions in which it is grown.

There are a handful of other plants which appear to be native to multiple continents, such as the Juniper berry. However, none of these possess the same unique features that can only be explained by intentional cultivation. This would suggest a migration of the plants, possibly tens of thousands of years ago. Some of the most compelling evidence for Atlantis, or whatever we call this far-ancient civilization, involves the presence of communication between continents before our accepted history.

Like the Egyptian artifacts found in the Grand Canyon, the emergence of pyramids with remarkably similar features around the globe, and uncanny commonalities in languages and symbols- the cultivation of the plantain is only one in a large number of connections that point to the possibility of a global information network long before the world wide web.

Could the humble plantain be a remnant of a technologically advanced global civilization, dating back over 10,000 years?