The Hyperborea Meme

Writers and thinkers have been meditating on the "Hyperborea" concept for a very long time, really since classical world Greece. It's the mythical arctic homeland of the Aryan people, i.e. the Europeans (and the Indians in Asia). The meme has been elaborated in various directions by various groups, and is still a subject of wild speculation. There's a lot of artwork, especially by Russian artists, that imagine the place. There are countless paintings like the one shown here:

The gist of the hyperborea meme is there was an advanced civilization of tall white people who lived in the extreme north which was a subtropical climate at the time. Then the climate changed catastrophically and they were pushed south.

There are many variations on the theme. Some are obvious government supported propaganda that push a political narrative. For example, one of the variations is that back in the days of Hyperborea, Atlantis was the main competitor, and indeed there was a conflict. Modern governments could coopt that myth and say we're the ______ and they're the ______ as if the source of modern conflicts were really the result of descending from two extremely ancient homelands.

I think the wild speculation is actually quite "valid". I think it's an attempt, essentially, to give an expression to genetic "memory". It's essentially a big unsubstantiated hypothesis that might or might not be true, just like the Out of Africa theory. Archaeology and genetic research provide pretty scant evidence, really, that's heavily interpreted, but still deemed "scientific".

The method of deriving the Proto-Indo-European language and religion is akin to the myth speculation, and it seems "valid". That is looking for traces of common language elements among contemporary languages in order to reconstruct older languages seems like a valid approach. The speculation about hyperborea, or outright invention of what it might have been like is similar.