In their creation story, the Mayans place Mu in the Pacific as a continent that pre-dates the Atlantis story. According to a translated Mayan Codec, the Land of Mu, like Atlantis, had been the center of significant social, scientific, religious, and cultural thought - it was, unlike Atlantis, an ideal place. When Mu fell during a massive geological upheaval, its people were able to escape to the continent of what is now South America and created the Mayan civilization - one of the most complex and significant of the ancient civilizations on the Americas.
Mu has been since taken up by what can only be loosely called New Age writers using it to link present day life to ancient and possibly alien origins.
In the Tamil (Indian) traditions, an island strikingly similar to Mu and Atlantis existed in what is now called the Indian Ocean, called Lemuria. Interestingly, while Lemuria is part of Tamil legend, the idea of it was actually popularized by English biogeologists taking up Darwin's work and using this legendary island as the explanatory place between the existence of particular species throughout the entire oceanic region. Again, though, Lemuria's original existence was as a human civilization - one that, along with another sunken land in Tamil legend "Kumari Kandam," were lands that had been part of the Indian sub-continent that over time became flooded by the ocean (Hancock 18). These histories claim an ancient landmass that connected Australia to India.
The problem with these geographical and geological tales, however, is that they simply fail to stand up to our modern understanding of Plate Tectonics - a debunking argument that will be made later.
In addition to the Greek, Mayan, and Indian legends of the Lost Continent, other mythological lands have been promoted throughout human history. But in this last category, mostly the idea of a lost or "undiscovered" civilization is little more than an intellectual exercise (Hope 17). In trying to explore the ideas that shape and create tales of the Lost Continent, using modern fiction is a completely useless exercise - anyone can make up a story, anyone can assert anything if they use the right words in the right way.
What we need to establish is this, can we trust ancient accounts of a land and people that no one can prove exists, that there is no true historical record of, that exists only within the context of legend and supposition?
Let us take myth and legend for what they are - unsubstantiated ideas that are used to explain a particular aspect of human life. Many Lost Continent myths are creation myths - this is how our people got here stories. As such, they are easily debunked when we understand the very tangible science of plate tectonics. Geologists have some rather to-the-point things to say on this topic- "let me just briefly mention that there is no such thing as a sunken continent," (Erlingsson & Karlen, Atlantis from a Geographer's Perspective 27). Wait, it can't be that simple. Just because a geologist says that there is no sunken continent does that make it so? Does that simply debunk the millennia of popular thought on the subject? Perhaps a further explanation is necessary:
After the advent of deep sea research...there is no longer any room for hesitation. We know no how ocean bottoms are formed through plate tectonics, and we know the morphology of the oceans in significant detail. There is simply no room for any sunken continent in the oceans. A lost continent, though, is quite another cup of tea," (Erlingsson & Karlen, 27-28).
What these two geologists are referring to is the basic tenet of plate tectonics, that at one time nearly all of the land of the earth that stood above water was one massive continent -a central island upon which existed nearly every part of the known geological world. Over billions of years, the tectonic plates (large overlapping puzzle pieces of the Earth's curst that move and shift in response to pressures of rising and falling temperatures, magma, and other forces) caused the breakup of Pangaea (Joseph 112). In this account, a continent that would have been once part of another, that broke off and shifted below the surface of the ocean in a series of events taking place over millions of years, could be possible - one such place is the southern and western parts of California, west of the San Andreas fault, which, it is theorized, will one day split the majority of that state off from the rest of the United States (Colins, 3).
Charles Pellegrino's work Unearthing Atlantis: An Archaeological Odyssey to the Fabled Lost Civilization,...
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