Supercontinent: 10 Billion Years In The Life Of Our Planet

by Ted Nield

  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.

  Weird science

  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.

  Lemuria and Katalakōl

  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 India
n 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.

  The scholar Sumathi Ramaswamy dates the appearance of Sclater’s Lemuria in modern Tamil writings to the late 1890s, when Tamil authors first made the connection between it and the mythic homeland, of Kumarikkantam, sometimes even referring to this lost continent as ‘Ilemuriakkantam’. Modern science was being called upon to lend a picturesque Tamil myth the aura of literal truth.

  The result of this process (which continues to this day) has been to set up a curious dichotomy. While academic historians in Tamilnadu do not necessarily believe in the literal truth of Katalakōl any more than their geologists might, among ordinary folk in Tamilnadu there is a commonly held belief that Western science ‘backs up’ the claims of their mythology. This continues to be implied, more or less overtly, in Tamil Studies.

  Citing Sclater, Blanford and Haeckel, Tamil ‘devotees’ (as Ramaswamy terms them) thus imply (and in many cases openly claim) that the Tamil people are the ancestors of humanity and that their language is not only more ancient than Sanskrit (which is true), but is also the mother of all Dravidian tongues and even the oldest language of mankind. To put this into a more familiar English context, this is rather as if students of English were taught Arthurian texts with the clear implication that all that ‘sword and sorcery’ really happened. As Ramaswamy writes, this belief serves a political purpose: ‘The collective yearning for an unreclaimable past plenitude holds together a people in exile otherwise riven apart by caste, class and religious differences.’

  However, there is a fly in the soothing ointment. The lost supercontinent of Lemuria never existed. The claim that it affirms the literal truth of the Tamil flood myth, via outmoded Western science, is an empty one. Science has moved on. By tying themselves to an unsustainable insistence on literal truth, Tamil’s devotees align themselves with outdated science, while at the same time depriving themselves of a more positive (overtly acknowledged) mythology. Myths, after all, can contain truths other than literal ones, truths that can be more fruitful. As Ramaswamy writes: ‘A mongrel formation, neither pure fantasy nor respectable history, Tamil labours of loss are vulnerable to disavowal and dismissal both as fantasy and as history.’

  Those familiar with the argumentation of so-called ‘creation science’ will find this philosophical bind oddly familiar. By insisting on the literal truth of the creation myth told in the Old Testament and by vainly looking for evidence of the supernatural among the things of this world, young-Earth creationists saddle themselves with a similarly impoverished mix. What they espouse is both bad science and bad religion, demonstrating nothing more than ignorance on the one hand and lack of faith on the other.

  In Tamilnadu the conflict between modern science and an ancient myth propped up by the trappings of science (variously outmoded, selectively quoted or fraudulently misrepresented) rarely becomes apparent. One senses that those who know of the conflict (rather than purported accord) between myth and modern science see little purpose in challenging a widely believed misconception that does little practical harm.

  However, every now and then political pronouncements can force the issue. In 1971 the Tamilnadu government decided to assemble a panel of scholars to ‘write the history of Tamilakam from ancient times to the present’. The education minister, R. Nedunceliyan, observed at the time: ‘When we say history, we mean from … the time of Lemuria that was seized by the ocean.’ That sort of thing can (and does) make scholars uncomfortable.

  As Ramaswamy notes, this Tamil belief remains ‘eccentric’ within the culture of Tamilnadu. The spurious linkage of myth to science is confined to courses about Tamil, taught through the medium of Tamil, using textbooks produced by local publishers and the government-run textbook society, and catering predominantly for those (mainly less advantaged) people attending state schools. And so the belief persists, a hand-me-down textbook fact, immortal but (mostly) invisible.

  Wave of death

  Facing Sri Lanka across Palk Bay is the tip of India. Once dubbed Cape Comorin, it is now known by its original name of Kanyakumari. In the 1950s it became the subject of a concerted political effort to ensure that it was incorporated into the emergent Tamil state, which took its present form under the Madras presidency in 1969. ‘Kumari’ is a powerful name in Tamil. It is the name of the mythical lost continent itself. It is also the name of one of its supposed mountains, and also of a major river that supposedly crossed it. Kanyakumari is the only surviving real place still to bear this heavily loaded name; a last bastion against the cruel sea that tore the Tamil homeland from its people in Katalakōl. It plays the role of ‘a vestige of the vanished’.

  Just a few hundred metres offshore is a tiny islet on which the Vivekananda Memorial now stands. It is composed of a rock called charnockite, a rock first identified in the tombstone of the first governor of Calcutta, Job Charnock (d. 1693), which was formed deep in the Earth’s crust 550 million years ago as two continental masses fused together. Geology does not admit to having sacred sites, but if it did, this would be one of them. For reasons that we shall explore later, geologists refer to this island as ‘Gondwana Junction’.

  Like many of the world’s sacred sites, the islet is sacred to more than one group. On 26 December 2004, at nine o’clock in the morning, about five hundred pilgrims, mostly Indian, crowded on to the rock to stand at the Vivekananda Memorial and see the sun rise. Although they would not number among them, before that day was out, over 200,000 people all around the Indian Ocean would be dead. Many had already died; waves of destruction and death were spreading outwards, triggered by the biggest earthquake for fifty years, caused by the very processes that are forming the next supercontinent. An event that has certainly happened before, and will just as certainly happen again, was about to overwhelm Tamilnadu.

  Before Boxing Day 2004 the most recent Global Geophysical Event, which by definition affects (in some way) people on every continent, had been the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. The Tsunami likewise had the effect of drawing the world together, but it also united Earth scientists in frustration that their knowledge had not been used to full effect, for example, to set up early-warning systems that had existed in the Pacific since the end of the Second World War. It also explained two things. It explained why Tamil people have an embedded myth of a dangerous and land-hungry sea that snatches life away in a catastrophic Kata
lakōl. And for me it explained why the seemingly abstruse subject of the Earth’s Supercontinent Cycle matters to everyone, everywhere.

  But now is not the moment.

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  QUEENS OF MU

  ‘Some kind of legend from way back, which no one seriously believes in. Bit like Atlantis on Earth.’

  DOUGLAS ADAMS, THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY

  Philip Sclater’s hypothetical lost supercontinent, invoked to explain the scattered distribution of lemurs, was haunted right from the outset. But of all the strange settlers Lemuria attracted, none was stranger (or had wider influence) than Helena Petrovna Hahn.

  Hahn (1831–91) was born in the southern Ukrainian city now known as Dnipropetrovsk but which was then known as Ekaterinoslav; she was the daughter of Pyotr Alexeyevich von Hahn, an army colonel, and his novelist wife Elena Fadeev. Elena, who had earned herself the literary sobriquet of ‘the Russian George Sand’, died when her daughter was only eleven. Although the family had moved around considerably, as army families do, her father was unable to take little Helena with him after her mother’s death so Pyotr Alexeyevich farmed her out to her maternal grandmother, Elena Pavlovna de Fadeev, she was nobly born, a well-known botanist, and another formidable character.