8/6/2023 0 Comments Lost civilization of muLibrary of Congress A hypothetical map (believed to originate with Ernst Haeckel) depicting Lemuria as the cradle of humankind, with arrows indicating the theorized spread of various human subgroups outward from the lost continent. “The probable primeval home or ‘Paradise’ is here assumed to be Lemuria, 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 numerous facts in animal and vegetable geography.” “Paradise”) may have been the very cradle of humankind itself. Haeckel even suggested that Lemuria (a.k.a. Later in the 1860s, German biologist Ernst Haeckel began publishing work claiming that Lemuria was what allowed humans to first migrate out of Asia (believed by some at the time to be the birthplace of humanity) and into Africa. Soon, other noted scientists and authors took the Lemuria theory and ran with it. Thus, Sclater’s theory gained some traction. This theory came at a time when the science of evolution was in its infancy, notions of continental drift weren’t widely accepted, and many prominent scientists were using land bridge theories to explain how various animals once migrated from one place to another (a theory similar to Sclater’s had even been proposed by French naturalist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire two decades earlier). This continent of “Lemuria,” Sclater suggested, touched India’s southern point, southern Africa, and western Australia and eventually sunk to the ocean floor. ![]() Moreover, he proposed that what had allowed lemurs to first migrate to India and Africa from Madagascar long ago was a now-lost landmass stretching across the southern Indian Ocean in a triangular shape. Sclater observed that there were many more species of lemur in Madagascar than there were in either Africa or India, thus claiming that Madagascar was the animal’s original homeland. Lemuria theories first became popular in 1864, when British lawyer and zoologist Philip Lutley Sclater wrote a paper titled “The Mammals of Madagascar” and had it published in the The Quarterly Journal of Science. Wikimedia Commons Philip Lutley Sclater (left) and Ernst Haeckel.
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