The lost continent of Lemuria Lemuria is the name of a mythical continent alleged 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. 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 Quarterly Journal of Science. 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. His explanation for their geographical spread and their concentration in Madagascar was that at some era in the past there must have been a land bridge between Africa and India, which he called Lemuria. This bridge, he
suggested, was a now-lost landmass stretching across the southern Indian Ocean in a triangular shape. This continent of “Lemuria,” Sclater suggested, touched India’s southern point, southern Africa, and Western Australia and eventually sunk to the ocean floor. 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 SaintHilaire two decades earlier). Thus, Sclater’s theory gained some traction. Although now universally debunked by Western-trained scientists, Sclater's theory about the lost land of Lemuria, originally published as a short essay in a relatively unknown scientific journal, was to find a new existence in the imagination and history of a long list of academics, occultists, colonial geologists, and nationalists. On this lost continent, some even thought, there once lived a race of now-extinct humans called Lemurians who had four arms and enormous, hermaphroditic bodies but nevertheless are the ancestors of modern-day humans (and perhaps also lemurs). The physical appearance of Lemurians has been debated for years. Some beBlue Explorer Magazine
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