Key Takeaways
The mythic fall back island ofAtlantisisn’t the only once - bang-up civilization to have allegedly sunk beneath the waves . In the nineteenth century , serious scientist toy with the idea that a " lost continent " must have once exist in the Indian Ocean . The recessed continent was call Lemuria , and what started as a strait - laced scientific hypothesis ended up attract all sort of " rightful believers , " from Victorian occultists to Indian nationalists .
The Lost Land of the Lemurs
The story of Lemuria begins with a British zoologist namedPhilip Sclaterwho wrote an essay in 1864 called " The Mammals of Madagascar . " In it , Sclater wondered how Madagascar , an island off the eastern coast of Africa , could be home to dozens of species oflemurs — little , qat - similar primates — while the entire continents of Africa and India had what Sclater think to be only a few species of lemur . ( In fact , Africa and India had no on-key lemurs at all , but Sclater aggroup some other bighearted - eyed primates as lemurs , include loris and galagos . )
This was long beforeplate tectonicsand " continental drift " were household words — plate tectonics did n’t gain adhesive friction until the 1920s — so Sclater ’s good surmise was that lemurs originated on Madagascar and migrated to Africa and India over a Brobdingnagian Edwin Herbert Land bridge the size of a " great continent . "
" I should propose the name Lemuria ! " save Sclater , naming the supposititious continent after his furred protagonist .
During the puritanical Era , kingdom bridge deck were " drink down up everywhere , " says Sumathi Ramaswamy , a chronicle professor at Duke University and source of " The Lost Land of Lemuria : Fabulous Geographies , Catastrophic Histories . " " Geologists , geographer and biologists were trying to account for similarities in rock formation , and similarities in all personal manner of flora and fauna [ around the world ] , by arguing that there used to be these kinds of state bridges or sunken continents . "
Lemuria as the Birthplace of Mankind
Charles Darwin publish " On the Origin of Species " in 1859 and for those who take his controversial theory of " raw selection , " there was one burn question : Where and when did the human wash first come forth ?
In a pop rule book titled " chronicle of Creation , " an influential German life scientist named Ernst Haeckel hawk his own theories of evolution , naming Sclater ’s lost continent of Lemuria as the likely place of origin of mankind . harmonize to Haeckel , there were " 12 miscellany of Isle of Man , " and the first humans to acquire from ancient primates did so on Lemuria and distribute from there around the globe .
" The probable primeval home or ' Paradise ' is here assume to be Lemuria,“wroteHaeckel in 1870 , " a tropical continent at present lying below the level of the Indian Ocean , the former existence of which in the tertiary period seems very probable from legion facts in animal and vegetable geography . "
Darwin , it should be noted , was n’t exactly a fan of land bridges and sunken continents . He oncewrote a letterto Charles Lyell , a outstanding geologist who promoted the idea that continents routinely sink and resurface , say , " If there be a lower region for the punishment of geologist , I conceive , my bang-up master , you will go there . "
How Lemuria Became Part of Spiritualism
Something that fascinates Ramaswamy about Lemuria was how this theoretical misplace continent enroll the popular imagination of the late nineteenth century and began to take on a life of its own .
" What find when scientific knowledge leaves the kingdom of skill and disseminates into large-minded society ? " sound out Ramaswamy . " How is that noesis taken up and retread ? "
Sclater , the geologist , probably never imagined that his supposititious land of the lemurs would be adopted by Helena Blavatsky , a 19th - century Russian occultist and co - laminitis of theTheosophical Society . Theosophists believe that neither science nor religious belief have captured the full truth about the lineage of Earth and mankind , but through psychical giving , the great unwashed like Blavatsky can access lost wisdom .
In her 1888 book , " The Secret school of thought , " Blavatsky explicate that modern humans are the former in an ancient evolutionary line of seven " root races . " Lemuria , articulate Blavatsky , was the home of the " third root race , " mammoth humans who were once hermaphroditic and laid eggs , before eventually evolving distinct sexual organs . Oh , and dinosaurs lived there , too .
From there , says Ramaswamy , Lemuria got wrapped up in novel - agey ideas of lost civilizations ( another one is called Mu ) where extremely evolved religious being once lived in ataraxis and concord . Those ideas remain today .
" When you Google the word Lemuria , the absolute majority of the hits are New Age situation peach about writing retreats and speculation centers , " says Ramaswamy . For $ 25 , you may even buy aLemurian quartz crystalfor " removing all type of energy blockages . "
Lemuria and Tamil Nationalism
The fable of Lemuria takes one last unexpected whirl . Back when India was a British settlement , British ethnologists became spellbound with seek to trace the ancestry of India ’s diverse racial and heathenish groups , especially the Dravidian - speaking peoples of Southern India . One 19th - 100 theory was that Dravidians , an ancient language family that admit Tamil , first emerged from Lemuria .
" The Tamil people clean up on the colonial speculation that the Dravidians came from Lemuria , and they combined it with patrimonial Tamil myths about Kumari Kandam , a lost Tamil civilization that used to survive in the Indian Ocean , " says Ramaswamy . " This fed into Tamil nationalism , in which Tamils see their linguistic process as the most ancient , and Tamil are the onetime and most civilized people on Earth . "
Even today , many ethnic Tamils talk of the town about Lemuria as a " Wakanda”-like lost civilization on a huge continent that now sits at the bottom of the sea . Ramaswamy says that Lemuria provides a way for a colonized the great unwashed to attend back with nostalgia for a time when they were " the biggest and greatest civilization on Earth . "
