Mankind had appeared on Mu two million
years ago, and a highly advanced society of
64 million people had developed on the
island before they were all but wiped out by
a huge volcanic eruption.
Around the same time as Churchward was
publicising his legend and tradition-based
theory, another more scientific group were
advancing the idea of a lost land. Naturalists
and zoologists who followed and believed
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution were
finding it particularly difficult to explain the
widespread existence of lemurs. If these
animals had all descended from a common
ancestor, as Darwin suggested, then there
must have once been a land link between
these areas. One of Darwin’s followers, an
English zoologist called Philip L. Schlater,
proposed the name ‘Lemuria’ for this
invented sunken land bridge.
As science has progressed since Darwin’s
time, zoologists can now account for the
wide distribution of the lemur family
without resorting to creating ideas of ancient
missing land masses. But at the same time,
genetic discoveries have proven that,
because of a massive natural catastrophe that
almost induced human extinction, all of
Mankind originally stems from a small pool
of biological variations.
Kumari Kandam and Lemuria
Kumari Kandam is a legendary sunken kingdom sometimes compared with Lemuria (cf. works of G. Devaneyan, Tamil: ஞானமுத்தன் தேவநேயன்). According to these modernist interpretations of motifs in classical Tamil literature — the epics Cilappatikaram and Manimekalai that describe the submerged city of Puhar — the Dravidians originally came from land south of the present day coast of South India that became submerged by successive floods. There are various claims from Tamil authors that there was a large land mass connecting Australia and the present day Tamil Nadu coast.
It is interesting to note that Madame Blavatsky described the Lemurians (her third root race) as being colored black and described the Negroid race, the Dravidians and the Australoids, Papuans and Melanesians as being descended from them.
In the light of current day science, especially in marine archeology and anthropology, such postulates are seen as nothing more than fanciful imagination. One of the prime proponents of the Kumari Kandam theory, D. Pavanar clamied that the Tamils were a separate biological species known as "Homo Dravida". Such proclamations have confined the kumari kandam theory amongst fringe Tamil extremists with absolutely no scientific basis.
