Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet by Ted Nield

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