[1] The films and book dismissed as myth the popular belief in origins of the inhabitants of Ireland and proposed instead that they are part of a common 'Atlantean' culture that includes the western seaboard of Europe and North Africa.
As navigation gave rise to coastal settlement over long periods of time, overseas trade and cultural exchanges continued until at least the North African pirates of the 17th century.
[citation needed] In earlier tests, Bryan Sykes, genetic scientist and author of bestseller The Seven Daughters of Eve, while analysing European DNA groups identified what he called the "Clan of Tara" – a genetic group that originated in what is now Tuscany, Italy 17,000 years ago during the Ice Age and that spread along the coasts of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic seaboards of continental Europe, Ireland and Western Britain.
The Atlantean thesis has not generally been accepted by the Irish academic establishment, who have criticised Bob Quinn for his alleged lack of scholarly methodology and the absence of hard evidence to back his theories.
[3] Quinn's response to this is to assert that traditional landlubber methods of scholarship ignore the maritime dimension of Irish history and can fail to recognise the deeper, more intuitive links that may exist between cultures and countries.