6 posts tagged “evidence”

Famous Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl wanted to test the legends and sailed the Kon-Tiki, a balsa-wood raft, from South America into the Pacific in 1947. By that expedition Thor tried to show that humans could have settled Polynesia from the eastern shores of the Pacific Ocean, with sailors using the prevailing winds and simple vessels.

Soon by using DNA, linguistic and archaeological evidence, scientists began to realize that the Austronesian-speaking peoples, including the Polynesians, probably originated from islands in eastern Asia, possibly from Taiwan, and moved southwards and eastwards through the South Pacific Ocean. The common ancestry of all the Austronesian languages supports this theory. At least some of the migration occurred against the prevailing winds and was deliberate migration rather than just accidental. Austronesian and Polynesian navigators may have deduced the existence of uninhabited islands by observing migratory patterns of birds.The possibility of such migration seems more likely in the view of recent research. More and more boat builders construct vessels by using traditional materials and techniques, sail them using ancient navigation methods.

In a short time he created New Age type of a book Lost Continent of Mu, the Motherland of Man. It was followed by the book The Children of Mu, then by The Lost Continent Mu and The Sacred Symbols of Mu. These books enjoyed wild success at the times, and even now have their devotees.

One can say, that even nowadays the search for a lost continent of Mu is still in progress. There were multiple researches on Mu and expeditions to various locations. Some called Easter Island a mountain top of a submerged continent of Mu.

One well-known institute even suggested that underwater structures off the coast of Okinawa, Japan, were the ruins of Mu without any real scientific evidence. Some marine biologists stated that they identified the ruins of an ancient city off the coast of Japanese Yonaguni island as the remnants of an Asian equivalent of Atlantis and, that it was sunk three thousand years ago during an earthquake.

Lyonesse has been also used as a setting for many modern fantasy stories. J. R. R. Tolkien drew some of his inspiration for the lost kingdom of Numenor from the legends of Lyonesse; one of the kingdom’s many names in his mythos is called Westernesse.

There is evidence that in Roman times the Isles of Scilly were one large island.. According to legend, Lyonesse stretched from Scilly to Land’s End at the westernmost tip of Cornwall, and once had some 140 churches. Its capital was the City of Lions, located on what is now the treacherous Seven Stones reef. The names of the traditional kings of Lyonesse are derived from Welsh and Arthurian myth. It is often suggested that the tale of Lyonesse represents an extraordinary survival of folk memory of the flooding of the Isles of Scilly. Cornish people still believe strongly in a sunken forest in Mount’s Bay. And there is archaeological evidence of the forest. The remains of it is evident at very low tides, where petrified tree stumps become visible.

Although in the next century scientists completely dismissed the idea of Lemuria, some strange events took place. In 1999 a research vessel in the Indian Ocean discovered evidence that a large island, the Kerguelen Plateau, was submerged about 20 million years ago by rising sea levels. Samples showed pollen and fragments of wood in a 90 million-year-old sediment. This might lead one to expect similarity of dinosaur fossil evidence and will help to understand the breakup of the Indian and Australian land masses.

Occult writers went much further than scientists hypothesizing about Lemuria. In 1880, one of them, Madam Blavatsky claimed that she had seen an ancient, pre-Atlantean Book. According to Blavatsky, Lemuria was occupied by mysterious humanoid species that were about seven foot tall, sexually hermaphroditic, egg-laying, mentally undeveloped and spiritually pure. The gods, aghast at the behavior of these mindless species, sank Lemuria into the ocean and created people endowed with intellect on Atlantis.

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Lost continent ”Lemuria. Did it really exist? For centuries people pinpointed the location of this lost land either in Indian or Pacific oceans. All accounts share a common belief that a continent existed in ancient times and sank beneath the ocean as a result of geological cataclysmic change. Current specialists think that although sunken continents do exist, there is no geological formation under the Indian or Pacific Oceans that corresponds to the hypothetical Lemuria. The name of this land was adopted by occult writers and some Tamil writers of India.

Where did the name Lemuria come from? Modern lemurs are only found in Madagascar, several surrounding islands and nowhere else. Nevertheless, archaeological evidence shows that other extinct lemurs used to inhabit the area from Pakistan to Malaysia. In the 19th century geologist were really puzzled by the presence of fossil lemurs in both Madagascar and India, but not in Africa nor the Middle East. That is why they proposed a theory that Madagascar and India had once been part of a larger continent, which they named “Lemuria” for its lemurs. Other scientists hypothesized that Lemuria had extended across parts of the Pacific oceans, explaining distributions of species across Asia and the Americas.

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Romans borrowed Greek crossbows and utilized it in their military campaigns to a certain degree. After the fall of Roman empire when the Dark Ages came, there is not much evidence related to crossbows. Obviously, they were used by medieval soldiers, because we have extensive evidence on fights with crossbows during the battle of Hastings.

Crossbow soldier had numerous advantages in comparison to longbow archer. It was one of the reasons why European armies used crossbows extensively till sixteen century. It was extremely easy to train anybody to use a crossbow within a week or so, while it took years of practice and for an archer to master shooting from a longbow.

The late medieval version of a crossbow which was called an arbalest completely pushed the longbow out of the battles. Arbalests were much larger than original crossbows and had greater strength and force. These weapons could easily penetrate most knights’ armor. Arbalests were sometimes considered inhumane or unfair weapons, since an inexperienced crossbowman could use one to kill a knight who had a lifetime of training.