No. 211

Mu and Lemuria

Where

Pacific and Indian Oceans

Type

Legend

First told

1864 (Lemuria), 1926 (Mu)

Behind it

Lemuria was an old idea to explain animal fossils; plate tectonics replaced it.

The truth

No lost city has ever been found.

Lyra Kael can take you here on the globe, tell you the story out loud and answer your questions. Start the time jump.

Background

Lemuria (), or Limuria, is a hypothetical sunken continent in the Indian Ocean that was proposed in 1864 by zoologist Philip Sclater to account for the distribution of lemur fossils on Madagascar and the Indian subcontinent but not in continental Africa or the Middle East. Biologist Ernst Haeckel expanded the idea in 1870, proposing it as the ancestral home of humans. The theory was discredited with the discovery of plate tectonics and continental drift in the 20th century, but has persisted in esoteric and pseudoscientific contexts. Lemuria was reimagined in Helena Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine (1888) as the homeland of a "third root race" of egg-laying, hermaphroditic proto-humans predating Atlantis. This reinterpretation lived on in the popular imagination, especially in relation to the Theosophist tradition or Tamil myths of the continent Kumari Kandam.

Text from Wikipedia, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.