Lemuria: The Other Lost Continent.

A panoramic view of Anse Georgette Beach on Praslin Island in the Seychelles, where the lost continent of Lemuria is said to have been. (Phil Inglis/Getty Images)

Everyone knows the legend of Atlantis, the legendary continent that one day sank to the bottom of the sea and was lost forever, but Atlantis is not the only land where the legend exists. Did you know ?, dived into the ocean in ancient times and brought about a large-scale developed society? Since the 19th century, scientists have suspected that there was once a landmass in the Indian Ocean that connected India, Madagascar and Australia. This lost continent was called Lemuria.

Lemurian Origins

In the mid-1850s, ornithologist Philip Leutery Scrater traveled to Madagascar to study the island’s unique wildlife. He unearthed fossilized remains of animals resembling lemurs and others found in India and mainland Africa, and suspected that a land bridge he aptly named Lemuria once connected the three regions. rice field. German biologist Ernst Haeckel, in his 1868 book The History of Creation, wrote that Lemuria was actually a large continent, the cradle of mankind, which then perished and became what we know as Australia. suggested that only land remained above water. Heckel’s theory may be partly based on a land called Kumari Kandam, told by the Tamils ​​of southern India, home to a powerful Pandya king, with large cities and highly developed There was culture, but it sank into the sea. The first to write about Atlantis as Plato in 360 BC, he may have been influenced by the stories of Kumari Kandam.

Getting Weird With Lemuria

After Charles Darwin published his seminal theory of evolution in 1859, the Russian author and occultist Elena Blavatskaya argued that Lemurian mankind, in addition to many other proposed Lemurian primeval species, was part of the Age of Dinosaurs. proposed that it evolved from a four-armed giant that lived in Her 1888 book The Secret Doctrine coincided with her sci-fi genre explosion, telling stories of everything from robots and aliens to highly evolved humans and extradimensional beings lurking in Lemuria. has influenced many authors who have

Despite its fantastic incarnation, however, the story of the lost continent of the Indian Ocean may contain a sliver of truth. In 2013, geologists announced that they had found rocks and minerals in the Mauritius archipelago that date back a whopping 3 billion years, long before the islands formed. This suggests that they came from an older continent that submerged under the sea and then rose again.