Vicarious Living
From David Hatcher Childress' Lost Cities and Ancient Mysteries of Arabia and Africa:
"I wanted to do more than just see Africa and Arabia, I wanted to explore its mysteries. According to traditional history, mankind evolved in Africa millions of years ago, lived primitively in caves and trees for the same amount of time, and then, about ten thousand years ago, suddenly came out of the caves and started building ziggurats in Sumeria and Pyramids in Egypt. Yet, these civilizations were still supposedly primitive, had little interest in the rest of the world except for the occasional conquering of a nearby country, and life today is far better by any standards.
"Somehow, I didn't buy that version of history. The fertile crescent and the Nile civilizations were no doubt areas of ancient civilizations, but I wanted to find out the solutions to such riddles as what civilizations had inherited the Sahara before it was a desert, where the Egyptians had inherited their extremely advanced sciences, where King Solomon had gotten his fabulous wealth, and what were massive, ancient cities doing in the wildest and most remote part of central Africa? These were just a few of the mysteries that I intended to investigate, and I would have to do it in person. Reading about them in some book was not good enough for me; I wanted to see it for myself." (pp. 15-16)
Not that I'm expecting he'll find answers which might transform modern understanding of these ancient civilizations, but I will vicariously live the life of the vagabond adventurer through him.