THE GREAT LEMURIA MYTH
THERE is an old, persistent Tamil tradition about a land that existed south of India called Kumari kandam (continent), a belief that is linked to the myth of the lost land of Lemuria, a figment of Western imagination. Accounts of the lost continent vary, but the common theme is that a large area went under the ocean as a result of geological cataclysms, a theory that geologists of today do not subscribe to.
The last Ice Age had a profound influence on the prehistory of humankind. So in prehistoric studies of coastal areas, it is crucial to understand the consequence of changes in the sea level. About 14,500 years ago, the sea level was lower by 100 metres. With subsequent global warming and melting of large masses of ice, the level started rising, in stages.
As the sea level rose, the low-lying lands in the coastal region and the exposed continental shelves were inundated. This phenomenon gave rise to the stories and legends of deluges that permeated the African, Amerindian and Australian aboriginal folklore and Greek, Roman and Hebrew legends, and the Indian puranas, which referred to pralayas. The coastal areas south of India that were submerged in ancient times evidently gave rise to the Tamil myth of the lost continent of Kumari, while myths of the lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria were generated in the Western world.
Lemuria is the name of a mythical continent purported to have been in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The lost continent derives its name from the primate lemur belonging to the group prosimians. Lemurs now inhabit Madagascar island, the surrounding smaller islands and Comoros island.
The term “lemur” comes from the Latin word lemures, meaning “spirits of the night”, a reference to many species of lemur that are nocturnal and so have large reflective eyes. Their distribution once extended from Pakistan to Malaya. The English geologist Philip Sclater (1864) coined the term Lemuria in his article ‘The Mammals of Madagascar’. Trying to explain the presence of fossil lemurs in Madagascar, he proposed that the Indian Ocean island and India had once been part of a larger continent, Lemuria. His theory was put forward before the concepts of continental drift and plate tectonics provided the explanations for the similarity and distribution of formations and fossils in different strata and continents.
During the 19th century, scientists frequently postulated the presence of submerged land masses in order to account for the present distribution of species. As Lemuria gained some acceptance within the scientific community, it began to appear in the works of scholars such as Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (1834-1919), a German biologist who promoted the work of Charles Darwin in Germany. Haeckel suggested that there was a land bridge that remained above water long enough to facilitate the migration of prosimians from Africa into India and the Malay peninsula.
WATCH OUT GRAPHICALLY ILLUSTRATED LEMURIAN MYTH VIA THIS VIDEOS...!!!
WATCH OUT GRAPHICALLY ILLUSTRATED LEMURIAN MYTH VIA THIS VIDEOS...!!!
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