Speaker 1: Hey, I'm open to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
Speaker 1: Dave's not here, Jared's here, and I'll tell you who
Speaker 1: else it's here. It's Philip Schlatter, his ghost. He's a
Speaker 1: nineteenth century British zoologist, and he's come across the plane
Speaker 1: of existence to be here with us today.
Speaker 2: I think you added an h in there, my friend Sclater.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he always wished his name was Schlatter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're talking about Philip Sklater. I guess that's even
Speaker 2: that's a weird name. I like schlaughter better too, sure,
Speaker 2: because he took part in something that was going on
Speaker 2: in the mid nineteenth century where people were trying to
Speaker 2: figure out where stuff came from that didn't seem like
Speaker 2: it belonged there, like in their country, Like why is
Speaker 2: this animal here when they were from another continent for
Speaker 2: this plant? That doesn't make a lot of sense. We've
Speaker 2: talked about this stuff before in terms of like land
Speaker 2: bridges and things like that. But he wrote a book
Speaker 2: in eighteen sixty four called The Mammals of Madagascar No Colon,
Speaker 2: just clean and simple.
Speaker 1: Good for you, Schleeter, where he.
Speaker 2: Wondered, like madagascars off the east coast of Africa, and
Speaker 2: they have dozens of species of lemurs, but all of
Speaker 2: Africa and India have only a few species of lemur.
Speaker 2: In fact, it was worse than that, they don't have
Speaker 2: any species of leamer. He was just mistaken and thought
Speaker 2: some other big eyed primates were lemurs. But he was
Speaker 2: on the right track as far as saying, like what
Speaker 2: happened here? And he said, I know what it was.
Speaker 2: There used to be a great continent that connected these
Speaker 2: things and that's how they got there, and that thing
Speaker 2: is now underwater, and I'm even going to name it Lemeria.
Speaker 1: Yeah, after his lemur friends. Yeah, yeah, And this was
Speaker 1: the reason that he was coming up with the idea
Speaker 1: like this, and he wasn't the only one. Apparently, lamb
Speaker 1: bridges were very much in vogue at the time because
Speaker 1: we didn't understand, like you were saying, how like a
Speaker 1: plant could be on one continent and also on another,
Speaker 1: And we hadn't figured out continental drift yet. That didn't
Speaker 1: really get traction until the nineteen twenties. So this was
Speaker 1: an attempt to explain that before the theory of continental
Speaker 1: drift came along or drifted along, and this continent of
Speaker 1: Lemiria supposedly was on the bottom of the Indian Ocean
Speaker 1: now but basically spanned from India all the way to
Speaker 1: Africa and Slater Slater. Yeah, he basically said, this is
Speaker 1: where lemurs originated and then they spread out from their
Speaker 1: case closed and we should say, like, it seems off
Speaker 1: to us now, but this was a legitimate man of
Speaker 1: science proposing a legitimate hypothesis that may or may not
Speaker 1: have been able to be tested. I'm not sure, but like,
Speaker 1: it wasn't meant to be crackpot. It was the crackpots
Speaker 1: who took it and turned it into a crackpot theory.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. It kind of gained traction in other circles,
Speaker 2: and we're going to talk about a few of those.
Speaker 2: There was one guy, a German biologist named Ernst Heckel,
Speaker 2: and he wrote a book called History of Creation. No colon,
Speaker 2: they didn't have colon's back then.
Speaker 1: No, they invented the colon with the continental drift theory.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 2: He had a theory about evolution that kind of flew
Speaker 2: in the face of Darwin where he said, you know what,
Speaker 2: this Lemuria place, that's my comrade. Sklater came up with
Speaker 2: I think not only was that a place, but that
Speaker 2: was where it all started. That's the cradle of mankind.
Speaker 2: In humanity, there were twelve varieties of men, and the
Speaker 2: first humans evolved from ancient primates and spread from there,
Speaker 2: and they did so from Limyria, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is problematic through and through. But it's
Speaker 1: also worth saying that Hackel himself was a respected man
Speaker 1: of science too. He was a very accomplished one of
Speaker 1: those guys who's like, I'm a biologist, now I'm a geologist,
Speaker 1: now I'm a geographer. What else do you want me
Speaker 1: to be? He was one of those dudes who really
Speaker 1: contributed to science. But again, at the time, this was like,
Speaker 1: it just seems to be like crackpot theories to us now,
Speaker 1: but they were still just trying to explain what they
Speaker 1: were seeing and it just turned out to be kind
Speaker 1: of wrong. One of the big problems with it was
Speaker 1: that he based it on the Maria, which there was
Speaker 1: no evidence aside from you know, O, well it kind
Speaker 1: of explains why this plant's here, this lemurs on this continent,
Speaker 1: and these lemurs are on this continent. There was no
Speaker 1: evidence for it whatsoever. So it's probably faulty to really
Speaker 1: start basing other hypotheses on this hypothetical sunken continent.
Speaker 2: Right, especially when there weren't even really lemurs at all
Speaker 2: in either Indio or Africa.
Speaker 1: Yeah, should we take a break, Yep, all right, we'll
Speaker 1: be right back. Uh. You mentioned Darwin. I can't remember
Speaker 1: what you said about Hackel, but I just imagined Hackel
Speaker 1: like b boy, dancing up to Darwin and like running
Speaker 1: his hand, like waving his hand in between their faces,
Speaker 1: you know how they did, and then dancing off. I
Speaker 1: can't remember what you said, but it triggered that image
Speaker 1: and it cracked me up. So thanks for that choke.
Speaker 2: Yeah, kind of that. It just flew in the face
Speaker 2: of what Darwin thought. And apparently Darwin was not a
Speaker 2: fan of this, uh, any of these theories about continents
Speaker 2: just sinking.
Speaker 1: No, he would shoot his TV when it was mentioned
Speaker 1: on the news.
Speaker 2: He wrote a letter to a guy named Charles Lyle
Speaker 2: who's a geologist who also thought that continent sank. He said,
Speaker 2: if there this is such a nerd burn, if there
Speaker 2: be a lower region for the punishment of geologists, I believe,
Speaker 2: my great master.
Speaker 1: You will there And Charles lyell, we're saying respective man
Speaker 1: of science.
Speaker 2: Too, that's right, you knew who was not?
Speaker 1: I do tell everybody a woman.
Speaker 2: Named Helena Blavatsky who was a nineteenth century Russian occultists,
Speaker 2: and she founded something called the Theosophical Society that believed
Speaker 2: that religion or science hadn't fully captured the full truth
Speaker 2: of the origins of Earth, which I'm like, yeah, I'm
Speaker 2: down with that. But she thought through psychic gifts that
Speaker 2: people like herself could access that loss wisdom, and that's
Speaker 2: where she lost me.
Speaker 1: And there's actually few people that fully embody everything I
Speaker 1: scorn like Helena Blovotsky does. Yeah, she wrote a book
Speaker 1: called The Secret Doctrine, came out in eighteen eighty eight,
Speaker 1: and by this time, Lamiria is not It's no longer
Speaker 1: like it's out of the realm of science. It's now
Speaker 1: into the new age movement, the Theosophists. It was the
Speaker 1: movement that Blovatsky, Madame Blovotsky, helped found, and I think
Speaker 1: it was also the basis of spiritualism too. We did
Speaker 1: a whole episode on spiritualism. She played a big role
Speaker 1: in that. But that whole trend of like going to
Speaker 1: seances and stuff. In the Victorian age, she helped kick
Speaker 1: that off. And in this book, The Secret Doctrine, she
Speaker 1: was saying, Hey, I've read Ernest Henkel before, so I
Speaker 1: kind of understand his idea that Lemria was the cradle
Speaker 1: of civilization. He said that there's twelve varieties of men.
Speaker 1: I'm going to say instead that there's seven. I when
Speaker 1: I call them root races. And Lemuria in particular was
Speaker 1: home to the third root race. And people said, well,
Speaker 1: what's the third root race? And she said, read on
Speaker 1: to your reader, and in the next passage she said
Speaker 1: that they're gigantic humans. There were who were hermaphroditics and
Speaker 1: laid eggs, but because we're evolved from them, they eventually
Speaker 1: grew distinct sexual organs.
Speaker 2: Moving on, Yeah, uh yeah, do we even need to
Speaker 2: comment on that? Besides it's hysterical.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't even find it hysterical, like you just yeah,
Speaker 1: you past that, evins Man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, now, I'm with you. But this is the nineteenth century,
Speaker 2: so you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but have you been on YouTube lately? This is
Speaker 1: so like of the moment still too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean Lemuria, if you if you look it
Speaker 2: up online, there's a lot of new ag sites that
Speaker 2: are talking about Lemiria and uh, you know, you can
Speaker 2: buy Lamerian crystals and things like that to you know,
Speaker 2: for the low price of twenty five dollars, that kind
Speaker 2: of thing. I think what is interesting is this final
Speaker 2: sort of twist to the story. Back in India when
Speaker 2: it was a colony of the Brits. There were some
Speaker 2: ethnologists from Britain who were at the time. They were
Speaker 2: really fascinated like where did the the original Indians come from?
Speaker 2: Here they have they're so diverse racially and ethnically, like
Speaker 2: what were the was the original ancestry, And they really
Speaker 2: honed in on the Dravidian speaking people in southern India.
Speaker 2: One of the languages a Dravidians was a language family,
Speaker 2: and one of those people that spoke one of those
Speaker 2: languages were the Tamil people t A m I l.
Speaker 2: And one theory was, oh, those people were the first
Speaker 2: people and they were from Limyria.
Speaker 1: Yes, so the Tamil people really love that. They actually
Speaker 1: had a legend already of some I think it's a
Speaker 1: Hindu legend about Kumari kandom and it's a lost civilization
Speaker 1: or under the sea under the Indian Ocean, so they're like,
Speaker 1: they're really kind of jibes. Hey, everybody, we're from Limyria.
Speaker 1: That makes us the oldest civilization, which makes us the
Speaker 1: most civilized civilization. Eat that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and thus have the oldest language.
Speaker 1: Eat that as well.
Speaker 2: And apparently today, even if you are I want to
Speaker 2: say Tamelion, but I guess just Tamil, there's still apparently
Speaker 2: this sort of fascination with this sort of lost world
Speaker 2: that they their original people came from and they like
Speaker 2: populated planet Earth.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so yeah, I find that more charming than new
Speaker 1: ag stuff, even though yeah, I know, yeah, wow, how
Speaker 1: much have we like evolved over time? Remember how we
Speaker 1: used to just be totally into Fortian stuff and like
Speaker 1: unexplained stuff, and like our minds were open, we were
Speaker 1: curious and we wouldn't do stuff.
Speaker 2: And now we're just like, yeah, Madam Blavaria, Blavaria, Blevotski, Lameria,
Speaker 2: I'm confused.
Speaker 1: Now, Lamotsky, Schlamiel, schlamazl say short stuff out?
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