Grove Koger

The seas were once so filled with continents that there couldn’t have been much room for water. Or so some writers, wise and otherwise, would have us believe.

Atlantis, described by Plato (?-348 BC) in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias, comes to mind first. It lay, perhaps, in the Atlantic Ocean. Or was it the Mediterranean after all? Or … Then there’s Mu, created by one Augustus Le Plongeon (1825-1908), who conflated it with Atlantis and confidently placed it in the Atlantic. The concept was subsequently adopted by James Churchward (1851-1936), who described it in Lost Continent of Mu, the Motherland of Man (1926) and a series of equally fanciful sequels. Not to be outdone, he placed his lost continent in the Pacific.

At one time, a near-continent really did exist in the South Pacific and Southern oceans—Zealandia. A large chunk of continental crust, it subsided tens of millions of years ago. Another chunk apparently lay in the Arctic, and its remnants can still be found in Canada’s large (and chilly) Baffin Island.

Which leaves us with the Indian Ocean, thought by some to be the site of a submerged continent that’s been named Lemuria. And ironically enough, it was advances in the fields of geology and paleontology during the nineteenth century that fueled the speculation.

The distance between southern Africa, which lies on the western shores of the Indian Ocean, and India is more than three thousand miles. But there are similarities between rock formations in both locations. In addition, lemurs can be found on the large island of Madagascar, off the eastern coast of Africa, and lemur fossils in far-off India. Could the other islands and archipelagoes that dot the Indian Ocean—Mauritius, Seychelles, Reunion, the Maldives, and Sri Lanka—be remnants of a sunken land mass that once linked Madagascar and India? Lacking the knowledge of human evolution that we have available today, paleontologist Melchior Neumayr (1845-1890) and naturalist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) hypothesized that such a continent might have been the ancestral home of Homo sapiens. (The concept is dramatized in the map at the top of today’s post.)

Several groups have since seized upon the concept of Lemuria, including Theosophists, members of a religious and philosophical group who apparently place it in the Pacific Ocean, and Tamils, the indigenous people of southern India and Sri Lanka, who identify it with a mythical homeland known as Kumari Kandam.

The need to believe is a strong one, and few of us are immune from it. As you’ll discover if you go looking, hundreds if not thousands of books have been written about lost continents, but an excellent place to start is L. Sprague de Camp’s fascinating Lost Continents, originally published in 1954 and updated in 1970. And for the best book about today’s subject, I recommend The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories (2004) by Sumathi Ramaswamy.

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