Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas.
Speaker 1: And this is the second part of a two part
Speaker 1: series titled Lost Continent, where we are discussing the idea
Speaker 1: of lost continents, sunken continents, sunken islands, lost civilizations. Um,
Speaker 1: why this idea is so intoxicating for us The actual
Speaker 1: science at work here as well as the pseudoscience and
Speaker 1: the cult as the occultless nonsense you consider as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so let's get in a little bit of column
Speaker 1: and calm be there with our next topic here, which
Speaker 1: is Lamia. Yes, the Lemur king's rule the lands. You know,
Speaker 1: if you if we hadn't researched it, and you just
Speaker 1: mentioned Lamaria and I had no background on it whatsoever,
Speaker 1: I don't think I would have thought of Lemurs. I
Speaker 1: would have it instantly. It sounds hellenistic somehow, it sounds
Speaker 1: it sounds exotic and magical. And I'm thinking that about
Speaker 1: this this rich world, you know, like something out of
Speaker 1: a you know, an early twentieth century pulp story where
Speaker 1: there's you know, some sort of fantastic kingdom and and
Speaker 1: maybe lemurs, but I'm I'm not picturing them as the
Speaker 1: ruling class. Yeah, I just see them popping up around
Speaker 1: the landscape with crowns on their heads. So the sad
Speaker 1: thing here is that there are no lemur kings, no,
Speaker 1: because you know, they don't lemurs don't need kings. They
Speaker 1: have it pretty well situated there on that a gascar
Speaker 1: where for the outside of the fassa, And of course
Speaker 1: humans they don't really have much in the way of
Speaker 1: natural adversaries, and they've they've they've had that, they've they've
Speaker 1: experienced sort of a uh an evolutionary shangri law there.
Speaker 1: But in eighteen seventy five, if you were trying to
Speaker 1: figure out where these lemurs came from, you might come
Speaker 1: up with a wacky theory, wacky hypothesis. Rather. Yeah, indeed,
Speaker 1: you might look around at the some of the fossil
Speaker 1: evidence and you see some and also just sort of
Speaker 1: evolutionary evidence of similar forms in Africa, some maybe some
Speaker 1: similar forms in India. And that leads us to Philip
Speaker 1: Lute Lee slater Um. So slater is is again he's
Speaker 1: tackling the same issue what's up with the lemurs? What's up?
Speaker 1: What's up with the I I? What's up with some
Speaker 1: of these other forms that are similar, such as the
Speaker 1: lorist of Asia UH and the and the and other
Speaker 1: forms found in say, Indonesia UH. And he ultimately observed
Speaker 1: that quote, while thirty different species of lemurs are found
Speaker 1: in Madagascar alone, all of Africa contains some eleven or twelve,
Speaker 1: while the Indian region has only three. And again he's
Speaker 1: drawing in some forms here there are not actually lemurs
Speaker 1: in the modern sense of the world, but he's saying
Speaker 1: these are similar forms. What's going on here? So eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty four he pins an essay titled the Mammals of
Speaker 1: Madagascar UH. Madagascar, of course, is pointed out as the
Speaker 1: principal homeland of lemurs uh and UH. And he's saying
Speaker 1: that this is to spread out all over Asian Africa
Speaker 1: by a land bridge connecting uh these continents. So he's
Speaker 1: speculating that this this connection might even have extended to America.
Speaker 1: And we would have had this supposed land bridge slash continent,
Speaker 1: and we would call this Maria. Yeah, and you also
Speaker 1: have an a son. Five scientists Hackle and Blandford jumping
Speaker 1: on this bandwagon, saying, yeah, there was a land bridge
Speaker 1: and it connected this and then therefore that is why
Speaker 1: they're all these lemurs or lemur like creatures populating the earth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and of course land bridges have existed. Uh, that's that's
Speaker 1: that's not crazy theory in and in and of itself.
Speaker 1: But we're talking about a rather sizeable land bridge here.
Speaker 1: We're talking about a lost continent that would have us,
Speaker 1: that would have bridged our modern continents together, Gone One,
Speaker 1: a land which was supposed to have reached three quarters
Speaker 1: of the way around the southern hemisphere with a gap
Speaker 1: in the Pacific. And scientifically, these continents have little to
Speaker 1: do with Atlantism, and even Gone want Aline is considered speculative,
Speaker 1: although it's still widely accepted. So some of this Lameria
Speaker 1: is connected to Atlantis as well in the idea of
Speaker 1: the sort of genesis of how things came into being. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we see this sort of trend again and again
Speaker 1: introduced the idea of a mysterious island, either as allegory
Speaker 1: or near hypothesis, and other individuals are going to grasp
Speaker 1: onto it. They're going to lift that idea up first, uh,
Speaker 1: first with the polls of of of science, than with pseudoscience,
Speaker 1: and eventually lofted high above us on the air of occultism, fiction, fantasy, dreaming,
Speaker 1: and uh and at times insanity. Well, and but it's
Speaker 1: just like the the idea of the Greek ideal of
Speaker 1: symmetry had an interesting idea behind it, like there's got
Speaker 1: to be another land mass over there to balance this out,
Speaker 1: because there was an understanding of mass in this example,
Speaker 1: there's want of an understanding that land masses have changed
Speaker 1: over the years, right over deep time really, and there's
Speaker 1: an understanding that animals could spread via that way, and
Speaker 1: but there's not really an understanding of a speciation. So
Speaker 1: it's kind of again, it's sort of like, Wow, they trying,
Speaker 1: they're trying to tell the story of how this came
Speaker 1: to be, and this is an explanation that makes sense
Speaker 1: to them at that time with the information that they had. Now,
Speaker 1: the problem with that is that you have the occult
Speaker 1: is hanging out right, and you have a little bit
Speaker 1: of information going on that's being extrapolated in a way
Speaker 1: that is not right. And what happens is that Lameria
Speaker 1: theory is picked up by Hellonia p. Blavotsky. She is
Speaker 1: at that time in an influential occultist, and that's incorporated
Speaker 1: into her U gaudy cosmos. That's how it's explained from
Speaker 1: Natural History magazine. And it's also woven into Atlantis. As
Speaker 1: I had said, and according to her works and those
Speaker 1: of her disciples, the Lamians were the third root race,
Speaker 1: gigantic ape like men, hermaphroditic and ouvi paris, with some
Speaker 1: with something like four arms and a third eye in
Speaker 1: the back of their heads. They interbred with animals, the
Speaker 1: offspring being the ancestors of the apes. Their discovery of sex,
Speaker 1: of which Madame Blovotsky took a poor view, caused their downfall.
Speaker 1: Who Yeah, and they were succeeded by the Atlanteans, the
Speaker 1: fourth root race and the ancestors of the modern mongoloids.
Speaker 1: According to her, and both the third and fourth races
Speaker 1: were full of cosmic consciousness. I love the idea that
Speaker 1: even back in the day, this is the idea of
Speaker 1: cosmic consciousness is being explored. That is phenomenal. I was
Speaker 1: not up on this particular theory. Yeah, I know. When
Speaker 1: I read that the theory, I was like, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: not really a theory that I love the idea of
Speaker 1: forearmed to maphrodic apes with a third eye in the
Speaker 1: back of their head. It's wonderful whose downfall was sex,
Speaker 1: which is just such a scientific line of reasoning. Right, Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, well, maybe that's why they had the third eye, right,
Speaker 1: and when they were so intosex, because they could do
Speaker 1: it as much as they wanted and they could always
Speaker 1: see behind them if someone else is walking into the room.
Speaker 1: All right, So um, moving on from Limeria. Now that
Speaker 1: we've again fully filled up the bathtub with occultist nonsense
Speaker 1: on that count, then uh, let's look to the very
Speaker 1: real world of lost continents. Uh. And indeed, if you
Speaker 1: want to find a lost continent, you can't do any
Speaker 1: better than to look back in time to the loss
Speaker 1: super continent of Pangaea. I mean, in a sense still
Speaker 1: with us, but it no longer exists in this form.
Speaker 1: Now it's generally forgotten that Pangaea is just the latest
Speaker 1: in a long line of about I don't know, something
Speaker 1: like it does in super continents, and we're going to
Speaker 1: see a lot more in the next two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty million years, and certainly in the whole five billion
Speaker 1: more years we have left for the Sun exploits. But
Speaker 1: Pangaia is the one that is most known to us
Speaker 1: because we can imagine, we know what it looked like
Speaker 1: we are and we can imagine it. We can imagine
Speaker 1: our current configuration fitting into it. Yeah, I mean it's uh.
Speaker 1: I've seen the analogy drawn. I think there's a House
Speaker 1: Stuff Works article by Molly Edmonds that that is a
Speaker 1: little bit of this. But imagine the continent of Pangia
Speaker 1: super continent is formed much like a supergroup or any
Speaker 1: kind of a really influential rock band. Right, first, one
Speaker 1: guy gets together with another guy or gal uh, they
Speaker 1: start playing drums together whatever. Then and somebody else joins
Speaker 1: the band. Finally have the full band going on. It's
Speaker 1: really great, and then they can't get along. They break up.
Speaker 1: Maybe first one one band member leaves, in another leaves,
Speaker 1: and suddenly everybody's doing side projects or their own solo work.
Speaker 1: But then eventually they're gonna get back together. You know,
Speaker 1: they're going to get back together if they're all still alive,
Speaker 1: or even if they're not, because the money is just
Speaker 1: too good, all right, So they're continually drifting apart and
Speaker 1: drifting back together, albeit at the slowest rate like this
Speaker 1: rock band. That's got to be immortal, right, because the
Speaker 1: rate at which this happens is um It's something like
Speaker 1: here here it is. To get some idea of how
Speaker 1: slow it really has. Let your hair and fingernails grow
Speaker 1: uncut for an entire year. Your fingernail growth represents the
Speaker 1: slower pace of plate movement, while your hair growth is
Speaker 1: the same as the absolute greatest distance any plate has
Speaker 1: traveled in the last year. That's very insignificant. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean we're talking the average rate of motion on these
Speaker 1: these plates range from less than one to more than
Speaker 1: fifteen centimeters per year. Now, just to give a quick
Speaker 1: basic run through on what's happening with plate tectonics, the
Speaker 1: Earth's outermost layer is fragmented into a dozen or more
Speaker 1: large and small solid slabs called lithospheric plates or tectonic plates,
Speaker 1: and they're moving relative to one another as they ride
Speaker 1: a top hotter, more mobile mantle material. And these a
Speaker 1: plate teconic cup processes have almost certainly been going on
Speaker 1: since the formation of the Earth four point six billion
Speaker 1: years ago. Yeah, and nearly all the world's earthquake and
Speaker 1: volcanic activity will occur along or near boundaries between these plates.
Speaker 1: So not only are you getting the drifting, but you're
Speaker 1: also getting the collisions these plates colliding into one another.
Speaker 1: And when they do that, they either create mountain ranges
Speaker 1: or one plate will slip under the other and just
Speaker 1: get subsumed into the to the molten lava. And most
Speaker 1: of these scenarios will cause volcanic activity. So this is
Speaker 1: where you see I wouldn't say it's see lost continents
Speaker 1: happening because it's happening at such a small or tiny rate.
Speaker 1: But here's this idea again that emerges that with all
Speaker 1: of these dynamic changes happening into these continents, maybe there
Speaker 1: is something going on. Now. To put this in sort
Speaker 1: of the timeline of of the of all the thinking
Speaker 1: that we've been discussing in this pair of podcasts, it
Speaker 1: wasn't until nine that meteorologist Alfred Vegner hypothesized that our
Speaker 1: seven continents had once been joined together as a super continent.
Speaker 1: We've all this is just a straight up you know,
Speaker 1: elementary school uh geography a puzzle. At this point, we've
Speaker 1: all seen what happens when you take the continents out
Speaker 1: of the puzzle board of the globe and placed them
Speaker 1: next to each other. You can say, oh, well, this
Speaker 1: corner fits here, this corner fits there. And indeed that's
Speaker 1: what of that Veganer was was noticing here that the
Speaker 1: borders of the continents matched up, they fit together almost
Speaker 1: like a giant jigsaw puzzle. And then when you throw
Speaker 1: in other clues such as matching rocks and fossils that
Speaker 1: are found in countries separated by vast oceans, tropical plant
Speaker 1: fossils that were found in polar regions, and vice versa,
Speaker 1: it all, it all indicates that that that something's going
Speaker 1: on here, that these continents were, in fact, uh once
Speaker 1: linked together. But the idea of plate tectonics Lee didn't
Speaker 1: come to the forefront ut of the nineteen sixties. So
Speaker 1: it's a relatively new um spin on what's happening with
Speaker 1: the continents, or a better understanding, I should say. So,
Speaker 1: if you turn back the clock, can you start looking
Speaker 1: for lost land masses or you know, land masses that
Speaker 1: that either no longer exist or no longer exists anywhere
Speaker 1: near the forum. I mean, you can go back four
Speaker 1: billion years ago and you can find a plate building
Speaker 1: blocks known as craton's, which are essentially giant rock cores
Speaker 1: starting to rise up out of the primordial ocean um
Speaker 1: and according according to a History of super Continents on
Speaker 1: Planet Earth by Alistair Wilkins on I nine UH, there's
Speaker 1: some evidence that two cratons date back to as much
Speaker 1: as three point five billion years ago, forming the tiny
Speaker 1: continent of Valbara. But there's there's a lot of speculation
Speaker 1: involved in this. So there's there's the more certain candidate
Speaker 1: for the oldest super continent would be a place called er,
Speaker 1: which I like because or sounds a lot like Moo.
Speaker 1: It's it's very it's very primordial, very primordial, and it
Speaker 1: sounds like it would definitely pop up in an early
Speaker 1: twentieth century pulp novel. But this craton, though, is behind
Speaker 1: an idea of Mauritia, if I remember correctly, Yes, and
Speaker 1: for for this idea, we need to visit Mauritius, which
Speaker 1: is well known tourist destination, located about twelve hundred miles
Speaker 1: or two thousand kilometers off the coast of Africa east
Speaker 1: of matted Gascar and in Uh. In two thousand thirteen,
Speaker 1: UM researchers found sand grains on the Mauritius beaches, and
Speaker 1: they looked at these and they found that they contained
Speaker 1: fragments of the mineral, the mineral zircon, and these were
Speaker 1: between six hundred and sixty and two billion years old,
Speaker 1: far older than the island itself. So yeah, they were like,
Speaker 1: what how is that working? Yeah, so they stay theorized, well, okay,
Speaker 1: sand grains must be the remnants then of Mauritia, a
Speaker 1: law microcontinent that once existed off the coast of Africa,
Speaker 1: and it was eventually submerged when India broke apart from
Speaker 1: Madagas Gascar about eighty five million years ago. So the
Speaker 1: thing is is that they had discovered that this area,
Speaker 1: this crust, is much thicker than elsewhere. And the idea
Speaker 1: is that instead of uh Mauritia being below in the ocean,
Speaker 1: that is actually sort of been consumed in that land
Speaker 1: mass itself. It is in the bottom reaches of of
Speaker 1: that area, if that makes any sense, and it is
Speaker 1: under the it is submerged under the Indian Indian Ocean.
Speaker 1: But it's not like floating there, you know, three thousand
Speaker 1: miles below right, Yeah, it's just kind of crunched down
Speaker 1: if you will. And in fact, analysis of verse gravitational
Speaker 1: fields has revealed other areas in the world's ocean where
Speaker 1: the rock does appear to be thicker than normal and
Speaker 1: could in theory be a sign of of other continental crusts.
Speaker 1: So just basically like the land eating itself. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean we just go we come back again and
Speaker 1: get into this idea that that that the Earth is in,
Speaker 1: our shape of the Earth is is just in continual change.
Speaker 1: It's just the change that takes place in geologic time
Speaker 1: and in deep time UM, and not the kind of
Speaker 1: thing that we can really truly comprehend from our very
Speaker 1: limited human perspective. Now, just to revisit Atlantis for a second. Uh.
Speaker 1: In Josh Clark's article about Atlantis, he talks about a
Speaker 1: city called Haliki, which may have been the blueprint for Atlantis,
Speaker 1: or at least the allegory. And this is an area
Speaker 1: that UM would have existed for about two hundred years
Speaker 1: by the time plate I wrote about Atlantis, and it
Speaker 1: had been submerged underwater. And it's a coastal city located
Speaker 1: on the Gulf of Corinthine, Greece. Was once a seat
Speaker 1: of power there controlled shipping in the area. It was
Speaker 1: also a major site of worship of Poseidon, whom Plato
Speaker 1: deemed the patron saint of Atlantis. And in three seventy
Speaker 1: three b C, and major earthquake followed by tsunami washed
Speaker 1: over the area and just completely wiped it out. So
Speaker 1: what's interesting about this is that archaeologists have gone back
Speaker 1: to this area and they said they've seen resettlement over
Speaker 1: and over again, and they've seen that this Helliki Delta
Speaker 1: was a really popular area to be in because these
Speaker 1: three rivers formed a delta of the broad and fresh
Speaker 1: water irrigated crops, and you had the coastal area, which
Speaker 1: is always nice. It's always beautiful to residing in a
Speaker 1: coastal area. Um And as soon as they started to
Speaker 1: figure this out, they began to do some really heavy
Speaker 1: duty excavation and in n archaeologists found a buried ancient
Speaker 1: sea wall as well as ten Spartan ships that supposedly
Speaker 1: came to try to help out after the tsunami UH
Speaker 1: and then twelve ft beneath farmland they found ruins of
Speaker 1: industrial buildings, kilns looms, a bust of Poseidon, and some
Speaker 1: bronze age jugs. So looping this all back to this
Speaker 1: idea of lost countinance in our desire to rediscover these
Speaker 1: areas of civilization. Hliki is a great example of that.
Speaker 1: And I think it's why it's so interesting to think
Speaker 1: that this other area Mauritia, existed and perhaps there was
Speaker 1: a civilization there. Um, and this idea that with all
Speaker 1: of this stuff is just getting recycled over and over
Speaker 1: again and is lost to us. Yeah, and and and certainly, uh,
Speaker 1: I think there's a lot of love of the Apocalypse
Speaker 1: pound up in all of this too. I mean, who,
Speaker 1: it's great to hear about a wonderful civilization, but it's
Speaker 1: even better in a way if we hear about the
Speaker 1: civilization falling. You know, in the same way that we
Speaker 1: look to our celebrities. We wanted to see them do well,
Speaker 1: but we also really want them to fall. So we
Speaker 1: can read about that too, because that's the the stuff
Speaker 1: of great of great fiction. And so yeah, I can
Speaker 1: well imagine that that Plato might would have known about
Speaker 1: the places that have been wiped out, islands that had
Speaker 1: where the civilization advantaged, or even the island itself had
Speaker 1: had been lost, and say, hey, that's a great idea.
Speaker 1: I'm going to use that. And when I'm writing, you're right,
Speaker 1: because he was probably like, I'm going to talk about
Speaker 1: this terrible moment in which the city was seized by
Speaker 1: something and this, and then there's this idea that this,
Speaker 1: uh this might exist frozen in time somewhere. And there
Speaker 1: are other examples we can look to elsewhere in the
Speaker 1: world where where there's a there there's a land math
Speaker 1: that was once above the waters, but now it's below UH.
Speaker 1: There's the Kurgouland Plateau, which is an underwater of volcanic
Speaker 1: large Uh province, also a micro continent UH and submerged
Speaker 1: continent in the Southern Indian Ocean lies about three three
Speaker 1: thousand kilometers to the southwest of Australia and is nearly
Speaker 1: three times the side of the Japan But to return
Speaker 1: to mid Earth, one of my favorite examples here is Zeilandia,
Speaker 1: which Zilandia and it sounds familiar if you're thinking of
Speaker 1: New Zealand, well then spot on because Zoolandia is a
Speaker 1: nearly submerged continental fragment that sank after breaking away from
Speaker 1: Australia eighty five million years ago, having separated from Antarctica
Speaker 1: between eighty five and one hundred thirty million years ago,
Speaker 1: and it may have been completely submerged about twenty three
Speaker 1: million years ago, and most of it, nine of it
Speaker 1: remains submerged beneath the Pacific Ocean today. Um So, all
Speaker 1: in all, we're talking about, you know, a land mass
Speaker 1: that's uh three million, five hundred thousand kilometers square kilometers inside,
Speaker 1: larger than Greenland or India, uh and almost half the
Speaker 1: size of Australia. But the only part of it that's
Speaker 1: really the main part really that's above uh the ocean
Speaker 1: that's actually visible, that actually has people and plants and
Speaker 1: and and is alive in that sense, is that New Zealand.
Speaker 1: And New Zealand is only a hundred and three hundred
Speaker 1: three thousand, four hundred and eighty three square miles or
Speaker 1: two hundred sixty eight thousand, twenty one kilometers squared. That
Speaker 1: through a lot of numbers and stuff out there, but
Speaker 1: basically New Zealand is the tip of this iceberg and
Speaker 1: the rest is is lost beneath the ocean. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier that the band has to get back together again, right,
Speaker 1: the reunion show is inevitable even if all the remaining
Speaker 1: members are no you are no longer alive and in
Speaker 1: all likelihood based on our current understanding plate Ticonics. The
Speaker 1: theory is that the continents will merge again to form
Speaker 1: a new super continent within the next two hundred fifty
Speaker 1: million years, and this will complete the latest turn of
Speaker 1: the supercontinent cycle. And then they'll break up again and
Speaker 1: do their solo projects. But then they'll get back together
Speaker 1: again for an even greater reunion in some incomprehensible distant
Speaker 1: future and who knows what that will look like. And
Speaker 1: robotics Share will be out there, Robotic Share will be there, um,
Speaker 1: and the great old ones will come back. Uh, there'll
Speaker 1: be an alien colony and uh. And also those four
Speaker 1: armed apes with the eye in the back of their head,
Speaker 1: the Lamarans, we will be the dominant race center. Yeah.
Speaker 1: There's also the astral projections. Yes, yeah, yeah, there's some
Speaker 1: some of them probably escaped into the astral plane and
Speaker 1: will come back, because who doesn't want to be around
Speaker 1: for the super continent coming back again. They're just waiting
Speaker 1: it out on the solar winds, my friend. Uh. So
Speaker 1: there you have it, super Continents, Lost Continents, Lost Worlds, Atlantis,
Speaker 1: all of the above wrapped up into two episodes. We
Speaker 1: would love to hear what all of you have to
Speaker 1: say about this. Yes, so let us know. Um, you
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