Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet (5 page)

At the time Sclater was writing he used a broader classification of lemurs than our modern one, including similar, related primate groups found in southern India and Sri Lanka and the scattered islands of South-East Asia. The pattern he found recalled the one geologists were puzzling over with their boulder beds and plant fossils.
Lemur-like
primates had a scattered distribution that didn’t make sense. One could believe, for example, that lemurs might cross the strait between Africa and Madagascar on rafts. But was it likely that these little
creatures
(or their common ancestors) could cross all the way to Sri Lanka and the Malay Archipelago, traversing the Equator and
thousands
of miles of ocean, or float there on rafts washed from distant shores?

It was 1864 when Sclater first published his proposed solution to the problem, in a paper called ‘The Mammals of Madagascar’ in the
Quarterly Journal of Science.
He wrote:

Lemurs could not have swum between these far-distant places – they must have walked – so there must have been land.

Sclater was not the first scientist to suggest a lost southern
continent
to explain biological (or geological) anomalies. Geoffroy St Hilaire (1772–1844), a French natural historian, had suggested one in the 1840s, having also noticed the peculiarities and Indian affinities of Madagascar’s animals. What Sclater did, however, was give his
creation
life by
naming
it. This enabled his ‘Lemuria’ to escape from the world of science and enter common knowledge. Lemuria, a place that never really existed, began to rise to the status of an Atlantis, to enter into myth and inhabit that same strange hinterland of half-truth. By the 1880s the idea of Lemuria had become well entrenched in the
literature
. The ghost had entered the machine.

Another travelling naturalist whose story intersects with ours at this point was Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913). Though later critical of invoking sunken continents as a way of explaining biogeographic provinces, at first he eagerly adopted Sclater’s Lemuria in his writings, believing that the giant vanished continent must have extended from ‘West Africa to Burma … South China and the Celebes’.

Wallace is mainly remembered today for hitting upon natural
selection as the driving force of evolution independently of Darwin. This is the great Welsh naturalist’s other great claim to fame. Unlike Sclater and the geologists (who noticed things that were
too far apart to be so similar
), Wallace’s breakthrough came when he began to notice certain animal species that were
too different to be so close together.

As you sit in a small beachside café in Padangbai, Bali, waiting for the Lombok ferry to arrive at the jetty on the southern headland, you look out at the palm-covered arms of land that enclose the bay, the fishing canoes drawn up on the sand, their great outriggers and prows painted like crocodile jaws, and you can make out your destination quite easily. Mysterious Lombok stands, densely wooded, against a pale horizon. Its classic cone shape tells you that you are looking at Mount Rinjani, Lombok’s 3727-metre volcano. In fact, though, you are looking only at its top half, and missing completely all of the southern, low-lying part of the island. It lies below the horizon, hidden by the curvature of the Earth.

The guidebook you are reading will tell you how different Lombok will feel from easygoing, relatively well-to-do Bali, with its colourful animistic religion, its devotion to flowers, its picturesque processions, representational art, rich music and dance culture and toleration of alcohol. For a start Lombok is much poorer. Even quite recently people have died of starvation there after bad harvests. And despite pockets of Balinese influence in the west, a form of Islam dominates the island.

It is tempting to draw a parallel between these cultural divides and the next thing your guidebook will tell you, which is that the short twenty-five kilometres of water you will soon be crossing separate two completely different animal realms: one Australasian, the other Eurasian. And you will be told that the divide is named after Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder of evolution theory.

Wallace spent much of his life in or around this archipelago (some of it engaged in catching a live bird of paradise for Philip Sclater at the Zoological Society of London). The ‘line’ he set out bisected the archipelago, running south of Mindanao, between Borneo and Sulawesi to the north of where you sit in Padangbai, and threading, like cotton through a needle’s eye, along the Lombok Strait. Like Sclater and his great realms, Wallace based his first observations
primarily
on bird species (mainly parrots, though not giant ones).

The Lombok Strait, your guidebook might also say, is a 300-
metredeep
channel with some of the strongest currents in the world, which is why the ferry takes four hours. But despite this fact, the Wallace line is not actually as sharp as they would have you believe. Depending on which animals you look at, you can draw many different lines through the scattered islands of the region. Sclater, for example, working with his son William, defined a different line much further to the East, dividing Celebes and Timor from Western New Guinea.

There are many other, less famous dividing lines, and even two ‘Wallace lines’, for the great man allowed himself second thoughts in 1910. Weber’s line (1904) is based on the distribution of freshwater fish, and farthest east of all lies Lydekker’s line (1896), hugging the edge of the Australian coastal shelf. It all depends on which animal you take as your most important marker. Different species have
different
abilities when it comes to dispersing themselves. Certain birds, for example, are more able to cross deep salt-water straits with strong currents than amphibians or freshwater fish.

Wallace never truly understood what his faunal break meant nor why it was so abrupt on a global scale; but part of the answer lies in the depth of the channels that separate the islands. Even during the last Ice Age global falls in sea level never much exceeded 125 metres and so never exposed the bottom of the Lombok Strait. A land bridge was never established. But if the seas around Bali had been shallower,

or the last Ice Age more severe, the whole modern pattern of animal distribution would have been radically different. Today, instead of choosing any particular line, biogeographers acknowledge a zone – the region between Wallace’s line in the west and Lydekker’s line in the east – and have dubbed it Wallacea: a broad buffer between two of Philip Sclater’s great faunal realms.

Until geologists found a mechanism that could make neighbours of such different animal assemblages with such different evolutionary histories, the origins of Wallacea would remain another mystery. And, unlike those animal assemblages that were too far apart to be so
similar
, it could not be explained by suggesting that large tracts of ancient continent had disappeared under the waves, stranding the lemurs and all their friends on now-distant shores.

The ring-tailed lemur was first described and named scientifically in 1758 as
Lemur catta
by the father of classification, Carl von Linné (or Carolus Linnaeus, to use his Latinized name), the Swedish taxonomist (1707–78) who gave his name to the Linnean Society of London, where Darwin and Wallace’s joint paper on natural selection was first presented in July 1858. All Linnaeus knew about these nocturnal
primates
was that they had ghostly faces, trimmed with haloes of white fur, big, forward-pointing, cat-like reflective eyes (that stared
unnervingly
at you out of the jungle) and that they made ghostly cries in the night that chilled the blood. He may also have known that local legends held lemurs to be the souls of ancestors. And so he chose a name that seemed appropriate, deriving it from
lemures
, the name used by the Romans for ancestral ghosts. (In pagan Rome these household ghosts had their special days (9, 11 and 13 May of the Julian calendar), days that became known as Lemuria.)

So when Philip Sclater brought the word ‘Lemuria’ back from the dead to denote a ghostly, vanished continent he unwittingly linked it to the occult. The circularity of this etymological accident may seem poetically satisfying and appropriate, but the name does almost seem to have brought a curse. Mythical lands attract strange settlers.

The astronomer Percival Lowell filled his fanciful reconstructions of the surface of Mars (1896) with cities and irrigation canals, yet he still forms part of the history of legitimate astronomy. But, in the days before people invented myths about aliens from other planets, they invented races that peopled long-vanished terrestrial continents. In the same way the fantasies of mystics and the age-old notion of
foundering
continents grade imperceptibly with the early science of the supercontinent story and prevailing theories about how the crust of the Earth actually moves.

The energetic and wildly enthusiastic German biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) got hold of the idea of Lemuria and suggested that Sclater’s continent had also been the cradle of human evolution. In the
Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte
of 1868 (translated into English as
The History of Creation,
1876) he published a map
showing
the radiation of humans across the entire globe, with all the myriad branches converging on the hypothetical lost continent.

This immediately raised the political stakes, as anthropology always does, because it closely affects people’s assumptions about themselves. The origin of humans is a charged science, and more interesting to most people than the origin of lemurs. Sure enough, it brought Lemuria to a wider audience, especially as Haeckel specifically linked the place to myth by subtitling the continent, in brackets, ‘
Paradies
’ (Paradise).

Here are two widely separated examples of how Lemuria caught on. In 1876, the year Haeckel’s English translation was published, Lemuria made an appearance in Friedrich Engels’s
The Part Played
by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man.
On his opening page Engels wrote: ‘Many hundreds of thousands of years ago, during an epoch … which geologists call the Tertiary … a particularly
highly-developed
species of anthropoid apes lived somewhere in the tropical zone – probably on a great continent that has now sunk to the bottom of the Indian Ocean.’ Even H. G. Wells included a reference to Lemuria in his
Outline of History
(1919), airily speculating that the ‘nursery’ of humankind ‘may have been where now the Indian Ocean stands’. Lemuria thus became a textbook fact and, in the way of such things, remained so many years after most legitimate science had abandoned the whole idea.

Crucially for what followed, Lemuria also became a textbook fact in India, through some ancillary work carried out by the Blanford brothers. In 1873 Henry Blanford wrote a schoolbook of physical geography in which he told his Indian readers that their continent had once been linked to Africa and that this link had been sundered by enormous outbursts of volcanic activity. Six years later William Blanford’s Indian Geological Survey published its
Manual
, describing the country’s geology. Here the case for a former geological link between India and southern Africa was clearly made. These scientific pronouncements found particular resonance among certain peoples in south-eastern India, the Tamils.

In 1974 Léopold-Sédar Senghor (1906–2001), poet and founding President of Senegal from 1960 to 1980, addressed the International Institute of Tamil Studies in Madras. He mentioned ‘the cradle of mankind’ and located it in the Indian Ocean just as H. G. Wells had done. He then went on to bring the date of its destruction under the waters of the Indian Ocean forward to the New Stone Age and
suggested that those places traditionally thought of in the West as ‘cradles of civilization’, Egypt and Mesopotamia, derived their knowledge from the peoples who had fled this cataclysm. Archaeologists, he said, should have the chance to explore the depths of the seas, ‘to discover old lithic industries or human skeleton fossils in the area stretching from East Africa to Southern India’. Senghor was a member of the Académie Française and the author of many books of poetry and political philosophy; but from a scientific point of view this was a very odd thing to believe in 1974.

In 1981, as part of the Fifth International Conference of Tamil Studies in Madurai, a documentary film was screened. Made with the personal backing of Chief Minister M. G. Ramachandran and paid for by the government of Tamilnadu, this curious film traced the origin of Tamil language and literature to its most distant past on Kumarikkantam, a mythical lost homeland, redolent in Tamil mythology.

Tamilnadu, the Indian state that stretches from the southern tip of India at Kanyakumari to Tiruvallur on the Bay of Bengal, is home to some fifty-six million people who speak Tamil, one of twenty-six
languages
spoken mostly in southern India and Sri Lanka and collectively called Dravidian. While many show varying degrees of Sanskrit influence, Tamil is the purest of all.

Tamil has a rich ancient literature and, crucially for this story, one myth in particular that cites a terrible flood that catastrophically
swallowed
up the Tamils’ formerly much more extensive homeland, destroying much ancient lore, civilization and majesty, and leaving the people with that small remnant of peninsular India which they now inhabit. Tamil literature refers to this inundation as Katalakōl.