Citation Needed

This past weekend, I found myself engaged in one of my favorite pastimes - watching a documentary about lost civilizations. It's actually something I've talked about pretty rarely on this blog, but I LOVE any television documentary about 1) Aliens 2) Ghosts 3) Mythical creatures (ie, Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster, etc) 4) the end of the World/Book of Revelations 5) Lost civilizations.

I'm serious. Life stops if I happen upon one of these topics on The History Channel or the National Geographic Channel. (Discovery joins the fray from time to time, but the the former are definitely my "big two.")

So anyway, this one show I was into was all about the search for Atlantis. They had a profile on a team searching the Mediterranean, one diving off the coast of the Bahamas - "Bimini Road" for you like-minded folks - and one guy was even talking about his Antarctica theory. However, it was the show's feature on a fourth researcher that spawned this particular post.

His idea was that, wherever Atlantis was, there must have been survivors, and these survivors must have eventually settled amongst other ancient civilizations. Sounds reasonable to me....

But his "proof:" Mayan artwork from pre-Columbian times depicting men with beards.

His reasoning: The Mayans would have no basis for showing beards in their art - unless they had been visited from peoples from far away - because Native Americans don't have facial hair.

Come again?

I am somewhat of a history dork, am fairly-well traveled, and obviously a documentary junkie, but I have never once in my life seen or heard any reference to Native American's lack of ability to grow facial hair. Can anyone confirm this for me?

I'm not saying I don't believe it, but it does strike me as a little strange. Why would one race of people not display such standard male trait? My immediate guess is that NA's are more evolved than the rest of us, with beards being one remaining to link to our monkey ancestors. But I'm really not sure.

And yes, I do see the irony here: "Mayans don't have beards...crazy!" but "Atlantis is buried under the snows of Antarctica....of course!"