The Ancient Legend Of Lemuria – The Mythical Continent That Nearly Became Reality

In 2013, a few scientists began to discover what may have been evidence linked to this lost civilization.

Back in the mid-19th century, a group of scientists with very little evidence determined that there had to have been a lost continent in the Indian Ocean. The group of scientists decided they would call this continent Lemuria.

These creatures were very different from homo sapiens, as they had four arms and massive hermaphroditic bodies. However, they also believe they were our modern-day human ancestors and perhaps the ancestors of lemurs.

As the idea aged and science, as we know it continued to flourish, the idea of Lemuria slowly faded away and became somewhat of a fictional fairy tale rather than a legitimate theory.

Geologists made a discovery that unfolded a unique fabric which never existed prior. Evidence of a mythical lost continent in the region of fictional Lemuria began appearing once again, giving rise to old theories. Could this be the answer that 19th-century scientists were searching for?

This paper became the catalyst for a theory that would eventually motivate the scientific community to look for evidence of something never seen before. Sclater had his paper published in The Quarterly Journal of Science, a reputable application at the time.

Essentially, his claims led him to believe that Madagascar was the lemur’s original homeland and that every species of lemur derived from that ancestor was an islander. This theory was a long shot of what had been proposed for many decades.

It troubled him that the same fossils were not present in the Middle East or Africa. To him, it meant that India and Madagascar were once connected as part of a much larger continent, which eventually disconnected. So, in many ways, Sclater was correct in his assumption.

At some point, this major landmass stretched across the southern Indian Ocean in a triangular shape, providing somewhat of a bridge for animals to cross and explore other continents.

He suggested that it lay adjacent to the southern point of India and the southern point of Africa, stretching all the way out to the western end of Australia. In theory, this was a relatively large island to go missing.

Instead, many scientists developed theories of land bridges to explain the way in which animals were able to migrate from one place to another with such seeming ease and a lack of modern technology.

With other well-regarded scientists in the loop, Sclater’s theory began taking off in the scientific community, as others wanted to know if the mythical island of Lemuria could actually exist.

Late in the decade, Ernst Haeckel, a renowned German biologist, began publishing his own work, making claims that Lemuria was the landmass that first allowed humans to migrate from Asia.

However, at the time, there were many educated people who believed the birthplace of humanity was Asia and that modern-day humans made their way out of Asia and into the plains of Africa.

In fact, he wrote that the island was likely the birthplace of humanity. He explained that this tropical continent, which now lies deep beneath the Indian Ocean, had a high probability of nurturing humans for so many years.

Many believe the map belongs to Ernst Haeckel. The arrows on this unique map present theories of spreading human subgroups across the lost continent. In a way, these arrows provide theoretical migratory patterns.

These theories were often discussed in parallel with the mythical story of Kumari Kandam, which was a fictional lost continent believed to be deep beneath the Indian Ocean. Experts once said that this island housed the civilization of Tamil.

Nowadays, Africa is the undisputed cradle of humankind. Of course, these 19th-century theories came about long before modern seismology and our understanding of how plate tectonics shifted the continents which were once connected.

Elena Blavatskaja further solidified the theory after publishing The Secret Doctrine in 1888. Blavatskaja was a Russian author, medium, and occultist. The theory in her book proposed that there were once seven distinct races of humanity, and home to one of them was Lemuria.

Her book gave rise to many fringe theories, which suggested that the people in Lemuria evolved into modern-day lemurs. Of course, we know all of this to be fiction now.

However, at this point, there were many people that had never heard of the Lemuria theory before and were wondering where these filmmakers and authors derived their wild ideas. Ironically enough, these artists had received their ideas from writers and scientists around 75 years prior.

That was until geologists began discovering traces of what they believed to be a lost continent in the Indian Ocean.

This was certainly an odd place for granite fragments to be, telling scientists there could be something they were missing.

Thanks to the surrounding volcanoes and the shifting of the Earth’s plates, the island rose slowly out of the Indian Ocean, becoming a small landmass.

The zircon that they had found was dated back to three billion years ago, many millions of years before the island of Mauritius formed. Essentially, this zircon had to have belonged to a much older landmass.

Scientists theorized that the zircon they found came from a much older landmass, which sunk into the Indian Ocean at the precise point where Sclater believed Lemuria existed. However, modern geologists referred to the lost continent as Mauritia.

During that time, the Earth was in a vast shifting period, still in its formation infancy, turning into the large series of landmasses that we know it as today.

In a way, this was somewhat of a bittersweet victory for Sclater, watching some of his theories come to fruition, with others wiped under the rug.

However, we also know that lemurs did not evolve in Madagascar until around 54 million years ago. At the time, Madagascar was much closer to mainland Africa, and scientists suspect the lemurs swam to the continent, where they would continue evolving for many eons.

We now know that there was never a lost continent that suddenly vanished, sinking into the Indian Ocean without a trace. However, we do know that there was once an island long ago, which is now gone forever.

Any deep dive on the Internet with the discovery of Lemurian culture in mind will lead you to websites that believe Lemurians for once a highly advanced society, who lost it all to the depths of the ocean, similar to the people of Atlantis. Some even believe in a rare type of Brazilian quartz, referred to as Lemurian Seed Quartz, which Lemurians once used to encode secret knowledge and share their story with future generations.