Hyperborea, Lemuria & Mu (Submerged Continents)

Cartographic, biogeographical, and antiquarian traditions of polar Hyperborea, Indian Ocean Lemuria, and Pacific Mu.

Specifications & Metrics

type: Alternative Historical Chronologies & Tartaria
timespan: Cenozoic biogeographical epochs through Late Pleistocene submergence (~50,000–12,000 BP)
defining boundary: Mercator's 1595 Septentrionalium Terrarum map; Sclater's 1864 Lemuria; Churchward's 1926 Mu
proponents or Body: Gerardus Mercator (1595), Philip Sclater (1864), Ernst Haeckel (1868), Augustus Le Plongeon & James Churchward
key evidence: Mercator's four-island Arctic continent, disjunct Madagascar–India fossils, Pacific megalithic platforms

Described by Greek historians Herodotus and Pliny as a temperate land beyond the north wind (Boreas), Hyperborea was charted on Gerardus Mercator's 1595 Arctic map 'Septentrionalium Terrarum descriptio' as a circular polar continent divided into four islands by four inward-flowing channels surrounding a central magnetic rock (Rupes Nigra).
In 1864, zoologist Philip Lutley Sclater proposed 'Lemuria' in 'The Quarterly Journal of Science' as a submerged continent spanning the Indian Ocean from Madagascar to India to explain shared lemur fossils prior to plate tectonics; biologist Ernst Haeckel (1868) and Tamil scholars (identifying it with Kumari Kandam) proposed it as a cradle of human dispersion.
Introduced by antiquarian Augustus Le Plongeon (1896) from Mayan codex studies and expanded by James Churchward in 'The Lost Continent of Mu' (1926), the continent of Mu was mapped across the Pacific Basin from Hawaii to Easter Island and Fiji as a prehistoric megalithic civilization submerged by volcanic gas-chamber collapse ~12,000 years ago.