A LOST CONTINENT.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 8 November 1924, Page 12

A LOST CONTINENT.

VANISHED STATE OF LEMURIA

AMERICAN NAVY ORGANISING AN EXPEDITION. The United States Navy is equipping an expedition to sound out ocean secrets, including the location ox earth’s first land —the lost continent of Lemuria, writes Ransom© Sutton in the San Francisco Chronicle. Geologists believe it is now covered by the waters of the Indian Ocean, excepting its mountain tops, which survive as islands, such as Madagascar and its archipelago, th« Mauritius Islands, the Maldives, the Laccidives, and many others. Like masts of a sunken ship, the “horsts” still stand, marking the place of the vanished land. Some of the islands are more than a thousand miles apart, yet upon them all are found peculiar insects and palms of kinds which exist, nowhere else in the world. It is thought, therefore, that the islands were highlands of the lost continent. , That continent may have originally extended, like a band, .around the entire earth in the region of the Equator. On a rotating globe, the cooling crust when thin would have been many times broken up and the fragments would drift from both poles towards the Elquator and finally form land. Parts of the belt are known to have existed, being called Gondwanaland. Professor Schuchert. of Yale, says: *

“The great equatorial land across the Atlantic, which had so long united Northern Africa to / Brazil, was being disrupted during Comainchian time and disappeared beneath the sea during the Cretaceous, or coal-forming period. The last of that primordial land to go was Lemuria, which submerged as Asia rose, quite recently—certainly during the present Age of Mammals.” It used to he believed that the Primates, to which man belongs, emerged from among the mammals in Lemuria. Professor Winchell. of the University of Michigan (and he was not a Darwinian), wrote: “It is now generally admitted that man’s birthplace was in a region covered at present by the wafers of the Indian , Ocean.”

One of the reasons for the belief is the fact that mor© lemurs —the lowest of the primates—-are found in Madagascar than in all‘ other countries combined. Since Professor Winchell’s death, however, the remains of lemurs have been found at & lower geological level in North America than in Madagascar. So the emergency of the manmarking primates occurred in this country. Professor Schuchert summarises present-day knowledge as follows: “Among the mammals the human line had its origin in the lemurs of - the Eocene of North America, which gave rise to the monkeys that spread over the greater part of the early Tertiary world. The European branch of monkeys, spreading into Africa, there gave rise to the small apes of .the late Oligocen© of Egypt. Paleopithecus (an ancient species) spread across the Mediterranean land bridge, and in the Miocene of Europe developed into the gibbons of the Euro-Asiatic countries. Out of the latter in late Miocene time originated the large-bodied apes, giving rise in the Plocene to the several independent genealogies expressed in the orangs, chimpanzees, gorillas and humajis.” '

The lemurs are supposed to have become extinct in North America during Eocene time, which was the first period of the Age of Mammals. Unless in some favoured locality enough lemurs, survived to give rise to higher primates, this continent could not have been the birthplace of the human race; for tnere were no man-like apes from which ape-like men could have been evolved* If Professor Schuchert is right, and every Yale graduate has faith in his findings, all the continents but Australia had a part .in the making of man. North America produced the lemurs. Down via Panama they spread to South America, and, after becoming extmct in North America, produced the tailed monkeys of South America, which found their way over Gondwanaland into Africa, where .they gf-ew larger lost their tails, spread into ituro-Asia. and somewhere while coming and going, due to some tremendous necessity, tree-dwelling a.pes became ground apes and gave rise to ape hke men. ; Descendants of those early men finallv found their way into the Americas —the Indians by the Alaskan land ridge, white men later on by wav of Europe. , ' "

Iho mapping of Lemnria is not likelv to prove of much anthropological im'>ortance. for it is now the lemurs, marooned on the islands of the ‘•'mkeu continent. originated in North America Of one fact wc mav be qnite ?' re - t “ e exact location where pro--"’mans acor.ired manhood, the real warden of Eden, is still a mystery.