Sir Grafton Elliot Smith (15 August 1871 – 1 January 1937) was an Australian-British anatomist, Egyptologist and a proponent of the hyperdiffusionist view of prehistory.

[2] Smith obtained an appointment at the Cairo School of Medicine in 1900 on the suggestion of his anthropologist friend Alexander Macalister.

[5] During World War I he took an interest in the neurology of shell shock, visiting military hospitals and serving on the British General Medical Council.

He proposed the following stages of development: Smith was decorated by the Khedive of Egypt, Abbas Hilmy in 1909 with an Insignia of the Third Class of the Imperial Ottoman Order of the Osmaniah.

His cradle was large, as he claimed the Mediterranean race had occupied the Levant, Egypt and western Europe, including the British Isles.

That line of reasoning reinforced the European origin of human, which Smith and Keith supported, as the mostly large brained specimens such as the Cro-Magnon had been found in Europe.

Smith believed that all megalithic phenomena, whether in Northwestern Europe, India, Japan or Mesoamerica, had originated in Ancient Egypt.

"Small groups of people, moving mainly by sea, settled at certain places and there made rude imitations of the Egyptian monuments of the Pyramid Age."

Smith interpreted a small carving detail in Copán stela B as an elephant, an animal unknown in the New World.

[15] Egypt held a fortunate geographical position that made contacts to western Asia and the Mediterranean possible, while being safe from invasions.

"The earliest cultivators of the soil in Egypt were in fact laying the foundations not merely of agriculture and irrigation but of all the arts and craft, the social organization and religious beliefs which became an integral part of the civilization that was being built up sixty centuries ago and in later ages was diffused throughout the world."

(Smith 1911, 6) Artificial irrigation led to cooperation and the development of a central government that was based on professional knowledge, a rule of hydraulic engineers.

At first, Smith remained vague on the reasons for the spread of Egyptian influence to places without mineral deposits like Polynesia.

However, in 1915 William James Perry, a professor of comparative religion at the University of Manchester, advanced the view that the "megalith-builders" were looking for pearls and precious stones, which Smith adopted as well.

Smith did not believe that the spread of culture was necessarily connected to a certain race, in contrast to other diffusionists, like the German prehistorian Gustaf Kossinna.

[16][17][18] Smith stated that Tutankhamen "narrowly escaped" the fate of being "hacked to pieces" by robbers, as was the case with the mummy of Amenhotep II.

Later on, hyperdiffusionism supplied a single simple explanation of the complex process of neolithisation that made it attractive to amateur archaeologists worldwide.