Kuntze, Otto
Otto Kuntze (1843-1907) was a renowned German botanist(e) who wondered about the distribution of the banana and arrived at the radical conclusion that the banana was brought to America when the North Pole had a tropical climate(a)!
His ideas were referenced in William F. Warren‘s Paradise Found(a). However, Ignatius Donnelly decided to modify Kuntze’s ideas and speculated on whether it was “more reasonable to suppose that the plantain, or banana, was cultivated by the people of Atlantis, and carried by their civilized colonies to the east and the west?”
>However, Donnelly’s claim was trumped decades later by Erich von Däniken, who claimed the banana was a gift from his extraterrestrial gods(c) and when David Hatcher Childress claimed the fruit was an example of ancient genetic engineering!(b)(d)<
(a) https://www.sacred-texts.com/earth/pf/pf13.htm
(b) http://www.itmightbepossible.com/2019/12/18/bananas-from-atlantis/
(c) forgetomori » Erich von Daniken: Fraud, Lies and Bananas (archive.org)