Case file · Folklore / legend
Frobenius finds 'Atlantis' at Ile-Ife
In 1910 the German ethnologist Leo Frobenius found a bronze head at Ile-Ife and later argued, in 'Und Afrika sprach' (1912), that Yoruba art was a remnant of lost Atlantis.
1910 CE · 7.48, 4.56 · status: claim
The account
Frobenius could not believe that Africans had made the naturalistic Ife sculptures. Later finds of many Ife heads in bronze and terracotta, dated to the 12th to 15th centuries, showed they belong to a local tradition.
The sceptical view
The Atlantis claim is now a textbook case of colonial bias in archaeology.