It's been two weeks since my last blog post.

I've spent much of that two weeks away from my computer, which has been a nice change. Since the semester ended, I've been working in the field, doing stuff around the house and with my family, and prepping my office for a move. Today I'm relocating from the main SCIAA building to a larger, nicer office suite right in the heart of campus. I'll have plenty of room to ramp up my research, process and analyze artifacts, store collections I'm working on, and (hopefully) start getting some student work going. It's really an amazing thing to have the space -- it's larger and nicer than many fully functional archaeology labs where I've worked in the past.

A 6000-Year-Old Moment Frozen in Time?

Archaeological sites are places that contain material traces of human behavior.  While the human behaviors that create archaeological sites are ultimately those of individuals, we usually can't resolve what we're looking at to that level.  Traces of individual behaviors overprint one another and blend into a collective pattern. The granularity of individual behavior is usually lost.

Usually, but not always.

I spent portions of the last couple of works doing some preliminary excavation work at a site I first wrote about last October. Skipping over the details for now, documentation of an exposed profile measuring about 2.2 meters deep and 10 meters long showed the presence of cultural materials and intact features at several different depths.  The portion of the deposits I am most interested in is what appears to be a buried zone of dark sediment, fire-cracked rock, and quartz knapping debris about 1.9 meters below the present ground surface. Based on the general pattern here in the Carolina Piedmont and a couple of projectile points recovered from the slump at the base of the profile, I'm guessing that buried cultural zone dates to the Middle Archaic period (i.e., about 8000-5000 years ago).​

The Anthropology of Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers in the Eastern Woodlands?

Earlier in the month, I had the privilege of visiting the archaeological field schools being conducted at Topper. I wrote a little bit about the claim for a very early human presence at Topper here. The excavations associated with that claim aren't currently active. Field schools focused on Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene (Mississippi State University and the University of West Georgia) and Woodland/Mississippian (University of Tennessee) components at Topper and nearby sites have been running since early May. Seeing three concurrent field schools being run with the cooperation of personnel from four universities (and many volunteers) is remarkable.

On the day of my visit, I gave a talk titled "The Anthropology of Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers in the Eastern Woodlands?" I argued that not only is it possible to do the anthropology of prehistoric peoples, but it should be a fundamental goal. Skipping over the details for now, I argued (as I have elsewhere) that complex systems science provides a set of tools for systematically trying to understand how history, process, and environment combine to produce the long-term, large-scale trajectories of prehistoric change that we can observe and analyze using archaeological data. I talked about each of the components of my three-headed monster research agenda.  And I got to eat various venison products prepared under the direction of my SCIAA colleague Al Goodyear. And I got to see alligators swimming in the Savannah River.  As a native Midwesterner . . . I anticipate that working near alligators will remain outside my comfort zone for some time to come.

When Did Humans First Move Out of Africa?

Archaeologists love finding the earliest of anything and people love reading about it. While we often want to know how/when new things appear, identifying the "earliest of X" often gets play in the popular press that is disproportionate to its relevance to a substantive archaeological/anthropological question. And you can never really be sure, of course, that you've nailed down the earliest of anything: someone else could always find something earlier, falsifying whatever model was constructed to account for the existing information and moving the goal posts.

Exactly a year ago, I wrote about the reported discovery of 3.3 million-year-old stone tools from a site in Kenya. Those tools are significantly earlier than the previous "earliest" Oldowan tools.  I think they're really interesting but not particularly surprising:  several other lines of evidence (cut marks on bone, tool-use among chimpanzees, and hominin hand anatomy) already suggested that our ancestors were using tools well before the earliest Oldowan technologies appeared.

I anticipate that we still haven't seen the "earliest" stone tool use. 

A recent report from India argues that our ideas about the "earliest" humans outside of Africa also miss the mark. (Note: when I say "human" I'm referring not to "modern human" but to a member of the genus Homo.) This story from March discusses a report of stone tools and cutmarked bone from India purportedly dating to 2.6 million-years-ago (MYA), blowing away the current earliest accepted evidence of humans outside of Africa (Dmanisi at 1.8 MYA) by about 800,000 years. With an increasing number of Oldowan assemblages dating to about 1.8-1.6 MYA are being reported outside of Africa (e.g., in China and Pakistan), would it be that surprising to find evidence a migration pre-dating 1.8 MYA?  Probably not.  Do the finds reported from India cement the case for human populations in South Asia at 2.6 MYA?  Not yet: the fossils and tools reported from India so far (as far as I know anyway) don't have a context that allows them to be convincingly dated.

I had a pleasant conversation with Scott Wolter yesterday. I emailed him to touch base about his participation in my class in the fall, and we ended up talking for about 45 minutes. It was the first time we've spoken and we had more to talk about than we had time to talk. We talked about the Wolter-Pulitzer partnership, of course, but I'm not going ​to go into the details of our discussion (I just invite you to read for yourself Pulitzer's bizarre word salad blog post from Wednesday containing his reference to me as "some back woods rural South Carolina Pseudo-Archaeologist who never worked in the field, but only learned from books").  My sense is that Wolter is someone with whom I can have a frank and vigorous discussion about the merits and interpretation of archaeological evidence and how it is used to evaluate ideas about the past. I'm looking forward to his participation in my class. My plan is to start a Go Fund Me campaign to raise money to fly him down here so he can interact with the students on a face-to-face basis.  

And now the movers are coming for my filing cabinets.  And now my chair is gone.  And now you are up-to-date.

I've often been curious what mainstream Christianity has to say about the Nephilim-centric Christian fringe that espouses a worldview revolving around human-angel interbreeding and the giants that resulted from those supernatural dalliances. Steve Quayle and L. A. Marzulli have made careers from the idea, after all, and promote themselves as prophets (here Quayle says he "has been blessed to receive prophetic visions"). 

I haven't had much time for giants lately, but a link to this podcast sermon from the North Peace MB Church popped up in my email this morning. I listened to it while going through my other emails, prepping more Kirk points for scanning, and getting another set of computer experiments running. In the podcast, titled simply "The Nephilim," Andrew Eby and Don Banman spend about a half hour discussing the familiar passages from Genesis 6 that mention the Nephilim.

If I understood them correctly, the agree with many if not all of the main points of the supernatural-intercourse-wicked-Nephilim-flood narrative that is Quayle and Marzulli's stock in trade.  Pointing to a supernatural world that is part of human existence, they accept that sex with fallen angels played a major role in making humanity wicked (starting about 15:00 in): 

They point out that God has intervened several times to save humanity from corruption, implying, I think, that it will happen again. They discuss the emerging science of genetics and its potential to extend the human life span as something potentially sinister. And that's about as scary as it gets -- no quest to identify and eliminate corrupted bloodlines, no clandestine engineering of giant super soldiers, no giants frozen in underground chambers waiting to be unleashed upon the planet, etc.

This book recommendation is also relevant.

Okay . . . back to work.

I spent a few hours today adding links to the Argumentative Archaeologist website that I maintain. I did a tour through the active skeptical websites that I know of, adding links to Jason Colavito's relevant posts from the last couple of months, some podcasts from Archyfantasies, posts by Michael Heiser on his Paleobabble page, a post by Carl Feagans about cranial deformation, some new stuff on the Ancient Aliens Debunked blog, a bunch of posts about Oak Island on the Oak Island Compendium site (those folks have been writing a lot!), some things from this blog, and a few other odds and ends. I also added a new page for Lemuria.

Please let me know about other sites and posts that I should be aware of. 

Enjoy!

I've spent most of today and yesterday trying to find a workflow path that gets me from the collection of 3D data (which I've been doing for months now) to a set of numbers that I can do meaningful analysis on.  This has involved, mostly, a lot of trial and error with various software programs. I think I've finally found a series of reasonable steps that will let me go from the 3D models to characterizations of shape data that I can examine visually and statistically.

This is post is mostly a way to document these steps for my own benefit, so that I can refer back to them in a week or a month when I've forgotten what I just figured out. This may not be the final procedure that I end up using for a large scale analysis. I'm putting this out there in public in case anyone finds it useful. Or in case I get hit by a bus and someone else needs to carry on with this important work.

Acquiring 3D Data

I'm using a NextEngine Desktop 3D scanner (UltraHD, Model 2020i). I'm scanning each point in two orientations: (A) one that exposes all the edges and (B) one that exposes the faces. Before scanning, I use a red pen (supplied with the scanner) to place a series of small dots along the edges of the point. These dots are used to align scan sets A and B into a single model (three points are required for alignment), so they should be placed in locations likely to show up in both scans.

I'm using the autodrive (rather than the multidrive) to rotate the points as they are scanned. I use part of an eraser to elevate the point off of the platform, and the padded to gripper to hold it firmly in place without damaging it.

For each scan set, I've got the scanner set to rotate the point through 10 divisions at the middle HD setting (67k points/square inch).  This may be overkill, but it's been working so far and I've been producing models far faster than I've been processing them (I've scanned about 90 points but have only processed the models for about 40). I scan with texture capture on, because I need to be able to see the red dots to do the alignment.

Processing 3D Data

I keep copies of the raw (unprocessed) scan data in an archive folder. At the settings I'm using, the raw data for a set of scans from a single point occupies about 300-450 MB. I copy the files for each point and put them in a "processing folder."

​Processing is done in the ScanStudio software that came with scanner. The first thing I do is trim away the non-point things that were captured in the scan. This is a simple operation: you just select what you don't want and delete it. Because I'm scanning in two different orientations, it doesn't matter if a small bit of the actual point gets deleted where it's touching the eraser and gripper - data for those areas will be contained in the other set of scans.

After the two sets of scans are trimmed, I align A and B. This is done by determining which of my red dots I can most reliably locate on both scan sets and marking them with color-coded pins. Again, this is a fairly simple process. I've found that some care in this step can significantly reduce the amount of time you have spend cleaning up the model later. 

After at least three pins are placed (I'm not sure that placing more than three actually leads to better results), you hit the "align" button and see what you get. I find it helpful to switch the display mode to "solid" at this point (removing the photo-like surface texture) because it is much easier to see how the two scan sets actually lined up. If the alignment is bad, you can tell. Sometimes an alignment issue can be mitigated by just going back and re-setting the pins and doing the alignment again. Other times it is apparent that the best solution is to go back to square one and re-generate the raw scan data (i.e., put the thing on the scanner and start over).

Assuming the alignment is okay, I fuse the two scan sets together with the "fuse" command. This is a one-button operation.  This is another one button operation. I'm using these fuse settings:

• Volume Merge,
• Resolution Ratio 0.5 
• "Create Watertight Model" unchecked
• "Include Textures" checked
• Texture Blending 5 pixels

Fusing scan sets A and B produces a new mesh, conveniently labeled "C." If I'm satisfied with the way C looks, I go ahead and delete A and B at this point.

The fused model requires some clean up. There are often small bits "floating" around the edges and at locations on the surface were data from A and B overlapped. These can be removed using the trim tool. The cleaner the model, the less time this will take, obviously. I really feel like the scanner has good days and bad days: sometimes it seems like the scans are really messy no matter what you do, and sometimes things just work out easily. Regardless, I'm not sweating pixel-level details on these models because it won't affect the kind of morphometric analysis I'm planning on doing. I just need the models to be fairly good approximations of the actual point.

After cleaning up the fused model, I run the "remesh" operation (resolution ratio = 0.9) to fill the holes and even things out a bit. Sometimes this reveals a few more defects that can be addressed through limited trimming. In that case, I'll run the "fill holes" operation ("smooth" and "smooth boundaries" checked) afterward to fill any remaining holes in the mesh.

The file I'm working with to produce these images is about 23 MB at this point. I use the "simplify" tool (set at 0.0050") to reduce the file size to about 5 MB. Then I create a .STL file for exporting the model to Sketchfab and a .PLY file to use for analysis in Landmark.  Here is the model on Sketchfab:

Deriving 3D Landmark Coordinates

This is the part of the equation I just figured out the other day. I discovered the Landmark software package (available here) that allows you position sets of landmarks on the surfaces of 3D models. The software was designed with three-dimensional, irregular biological structures (such as bones) in mind, but will work great for projectile points as well. It is mainly a software to acquire, rather than analyze, coordinate data (at least in my plan). 

Even though the manual says the software will work with .STL files, it didn't seem to want to do it for me. So I converted a batch of 10 Kirk models into .PLY files so I could import them into Landmark and work my way through the process of generating data. I added the model I just created above to the batch to illustrate the steps in this software.

For a trial run, I defined five replicable landmarks that can be placed in the haft region when the point is orientated with the tip pointing up: the points of greatest constriction (s0 and s1), the points of greatest width below the notches (s2 and s3), and the point of greatest divergence from horizontal along the basal edge (s5). The labels are automatically applied to the points as you place them.

As in other software like this, you place the landmarks in the same order each time because the end result is to going to be a file of numbers with XYZ coordinates corresponding to the locations of those landmarks on each of the objects in your assemblage. The next software that reads that file is going to assume that the coordinates are all in the same order, so they better be or you'll get nonsense back. Landmark helps with this by making the process of applying consistent sets of landmarks to different objects semi-automated.

Here is a close up showing the landmarks placed on the surface of the model. You can use your mouse to drag them around and get them exactly where you want them:

After I placed the five landmarks on a group of ten Kirk point models, I exported the coordinates of the landmarks by highlighting all the models (listed in the pane on the left) and using the "export" function (in the Project menu). I had to play around with several different options to get a file that would eventually work in the analysis software I found (see below). Supposedly I should be able to export files in a format that can be read directly by MorphoJ, but I couldn't get it to work. I had to export the data in the .DTA format and then just edit the text file myself to a format that MorphoJ could read. The .DTA format has the advantage of being a single file with all the coordinates clearly organized, so editing it was no big deal.

Analysis of 3D Coordinate Data 

Once you have 3D coordinate data, what do you do with them? I was surprised to find that my most beloved data analysis package, JMP, doesn't seem to be able to hand 3D coordinate data. Some of software that can do tricks with 3D data, like EVAN, costs money (which I'd like to avoid spending on a product that I'm not sure is actually going to do what I want it to do).  I downloaded various free software packages and played around with several of them. The one I finally got work is called MorphoJ (available here).

The first trick is getting the 3D coordinate data exported from Landmark to be read properly in MorphoJ. As I said above, this wasn't as easy as advertised (here's the relevant section of the MorphoJ manual). Eventually I gave up on the "easy" route and just edited the data from Landmark into a standard comma-delimited text file using Notepad. For future reference, the input data file should look like this:

The first line gives MorphoJ the column labels. Each line after that contains data for a single Kirk point: the label of the point, the XYZ coordinates of the first landmark, the XYZ coordinates of the second landmark, etc. Don't put commas at the end of lines, don't put in any tabs, etc.

After you create the data file, you import it into MorphoJ using File-->Create New Project. In the dialog that comes up, click "3 dimensions," select "text" as file type, and then navigate to the text file with the coordinate data. If there are no problems with the import it will tell you so. 

Once the data are in there, they'll show up on the Project Tree. Select the data set, go to the Preliminaries menu, and choose "New Procrustes Fit." This performs a Procrustes analysis that rotates, translates, and scales the objects in space to minimize their differences:

The graphic above shows the results of the Procrustes analysis, with the numbered points representing the centroids and clouds of smaller points around them representing the spread of actual data values. Notice that the points are flipped vertically and horizontally from the way I showed them in the images above, and also that s0 is now "1," s1 is now "2," etc. The results can be viewed along three different axes.

The Procrustes data can be used to do a Principal Components Analysis, which reduces the three axes down to two.  Here is what that looks like:

Now we're getting somewhere!  The last hurdle will be to figure out if/how I can export the raw principal component data so I can analyze it in another software package.

Working my way through these steps was a "proof of concept" exercise that I needed to do before scaling the analysis up to the full sample. I've been down a lot of dead ends with software.  I'm hoping this is the combination that gets me to a full-scale analysis. The five landmarks I used for the test run really don't take advantage of the 3D model data that I have, so I'll need to start thinking in three dimensions rather than two. And I still don't know how to make use of the data from curves. Once I get those things sorted out, it will be really interesting to see how variation patterns out with a much larger sample (I'm aiming for 100) from a single county and a single raw material. Based on what I've seen as I've been creating the 3D models, I will be surprised if some component of temporal variation is not detectable.  

And then, of course, I'll need to do about 10,000 more of these to see what's going on in the rest of the country.

I submitted the final grades for my class yesterday, so barring some kind of last minute disaster, my first academic year at South Carolina is done. I'm spending the last part of the week working on the radiocarbon compilation (which I'll need for my paper at SEAC in the fall), moving forward with analysis for a couple of publications I'm working on, and prepping to go in the field and then give a talk next week. My blog has been getting a lot of traffic related to the posts I wrote about the ethnographic megalithic societies of India and Indonesia last year (most of them should come up if you search on "megaliths").  I wish I had time to look at that stuff again right now, but I don't.

I wanted to post this histogram showing the distribution of the ~9,100 dates (intercepts) currently in the radiocarbon compilation (here's the map of the dates I made yesterday). There's a pretty clear trend of an increasing number of dates through time.  Part of that, I think, almost certainly reflects the emphasis that archaeology in the Eastern Woodlands places on the Woodland and Late Prehistoric/Mississippian societies that largely post-date 2000 RCYBP (and the fact that those societies tend to produce large sites with lots of datable deposits). But I think the chart below, as unrefined as it is, is probably also telling us something very basic about demographic change.  There's an inflection point in the number of dates toward the end of the Middle Archaic period (about 5500 RCYBP) that corresponds in time to when we see (generally) more intensively occupied sites, indicators of decreasing mobility, and increasing use of plants that are later domesticates. Yes, I'm saying intensification.

I think I've found a path forward that will let me extract morphometric data from the 3D models of Kirk points that I've been producing (I've got 41 models uploaded to Sketchfab so far, with a goal of 100 from Allendale County, South Carolina, to serve as the basis for a paper). I found a software package called Landmark (available here for free) that was developed at UC Davis for use with biological materials (i.e., irregularly shaped things).  It allows you to load in a 3D model, place markers and curves on the surface, and export the coordinates of the points for analysis.  I've spent the day learning how to use the software, and have generated a small data set of five points and four curves from ten of my Kirk point models.  The next step is to figure out how to go from the XYZ coordinates that the software exports into something that I can meaningfully analyze.  I don't think that the data analysis package I use (JMP) will do things like Procrustes analysis and, honestly, I've never attempted to analyze a 3D dataset and will need to do some reading to figure out how to start.  If any of my bioanthropology friends have done this sort of thing with morphometric data from skeletal remains and have some advice, I'm listening. Please do not tell me to learn how to use R.

I'm running late but I just produced this quick map and wanted to post it: the Eastern Woodlands radiocarbon compilation now has over 9000 dates with county-level provenience. And there are more on deck waiting to be included. Stay tuned.

I've got a blogging backlog.  It's the usual story of more things to write about than time to write about them. Before #Swordgate took the air out of the room, I was working on understanding how modern belief in giants was tied to Young Earth Creationism and indigenous American religious movements (see this post on Seventh Day Adventists and the Deluge Society).  Tied to my interest in giants, I had started dabbling in understanding how the remains of Gigantopithecus (an actual animal that lived in east Asia) are incorporated into narratives about giants and Bigfoot (see this post about the lack of postcranial remains and this post about tooth size). I've been spending more of my blogging time writing about my Archaic research (i.e., the Kirk Project and, lately, an effort to compile a massive Eastern Woodlands radiocarbon database) than fringe stuff lately.  There isn't time to keep all the balls in the air at once, but I intend to keep talking about all these things and more as I have the opportunity over the summer.

This post about Ernst Haeckel and the lost continent of Lemuria is one I started a long time ago. I'm going to wrap it up and post it to get it out of my "draft" box.

Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) would easily make any reasonable list of the Top Ten Most Racist Anthropologists. A biologist by training, Haeckel regarded the various "races" of humans as being distinct species that evolved from some hypothetical, pre-language "primaeval ape-man" (Homo primeginius). He arranged his twelve living species of humans hierarchically. Unsurprisingly, Caucasians (including Indo-Germans) were at the top of the heap.  While Haeckel was clearly a racist, it is not clear exactly how his ideas contributed to the rise of Nazism (see this essay for one treatment).

In Volume II of the 1887 English edition of The History of Creation  (a German version is here) Haeckel laid out his evolutionary taxonomy of humans. He proposed a basic division between "straight-haired men" and "woolly-haired men,' the common ancestor of which was speechless "ape-like men," or Pithecanthrops. In other words, Haeckel thought the languages of "straight-haired men" and "woolly-haired men" emerged independently after these different species of humans diverged. While he was clearly thinking in evolutionary rather than creationist terms, Haeckel's (1887:293-294) description of the pre-language divergence of difference "species" of humans resonates with a polygenist perspective on human variation:

"These Ape-like men, or Pithecanthropi, very probably existed towards the end of the Tertiary period. They originated out of the Man-like Apes, or Anthropoides, by becoming completely habituated to an upright walk, and by the corresponding stronger differentiation of both pairs of legs. The fore hand of the Anthropoides became the human hand, their hinder hand became a foot for walking. Although these Ape-like Men must not merely by the external formation of their bodies, but also by their internal mental development, have been much more akin to real Men than the Man-like Apes could have been, yet they did not possess the real and chief characteristic of man, namely, the articulate human language of words, the corresponding development of a higher consciousness, and the formation of ideas. The certain proof that such Primaeval Men without the power of speech, or Ape-like Men, must have preceded men possessing speech, is the result arrived at by an inquiring mind from comparative philology (from the "comparative anatomy "of language), and especially from the history of the development of language In every child ("glottal ontogenesis ") as well as in every nation ("glottal phylogenesis ").
     . . . As, according to the unanimous opinion of most eminent philologists, all human languages are not derived from a common primaeval language, we must assume a polyphyletic origin of language, and in accordance with this a polyphyletic transition from speechless Ape-like Men to Genuine Men."

Notice that Haeckel's family tree classifies the ancestor of humans as an Asian ape closely related to gibbons and orangutans. Haeckel was writing at a time when fossil evidence of human evolution was still incredibly thin: the few Neanderthal remains that had been found in Europe were not well understood, and Eugene Dubois' (1891) discovery of fossils in Java (now classified as Homo erectus) was still in the future. In short, there was no consensus about what the fossils of a human ancestor would look like or where in the world they should be found. In this vacuum of fossil evidence, Haeckel relied on the study of linguistics of living peoples to reconstruct human evolution.

If all of this sounds rather quaint and harmless, read on in Haeckel's treatise to understand the implications of his understanding of linguistic and physical variation among human populations (1887:307-310): 

"[The Ulotrichi, or woolly-haired men] are on the whole at a much lower stage of development, and more like apes, than most of the Lissotrichi, or straight-haired men. The Ulotrichi are incapable of a true inner culture and of a higher mental development, even under the favourable conditions of adaptation now offered to them in the United States of North America. No woolly-haired nation has ever had an important " history.""

In Haeckel's view, differences in language clearly reflect innate biological differences in the cognitive capacities of different human groups, and, therefore, their actual degree of humanity. That is just about as racist as it gets.

Wile Haeckel saw linguistic variation in human populations as polyphyletic (marking development since the divergence of humans species from a common ancestor), he recognized that the human lineage must ultimately be monophyletic (descended from a common ancestor) and therefore have some geographic place of origin. Turning to the question of where in the world the common ancestor of humans originated, Haeckel (1887:326) rejects the existing continents as the location of "Paradise" (i.e. "the cradle of the human race") and proposes that the lost continent of Lemuria makes the most sense: 

"But there are a number of circumstances (especially chorological facts) which suggest that the primaeval home of man was a continent now sunk below the surface of the Indian Ocean, which extended along the south of Asia, as it is at present (and probably in direct connection with it), towards the east, as far as further India and the Sunda Islands; towards the west, as far as Madagascar and the south-eastern shores of Africa. We have already mentioned that many facts in animal and vegetable geography render the former existence of such a south Indian continent very probable. (Compare vol i. p. 361.) Sclater has given this continent the name of Lemuria, from the Semi-apes which were characteristic of it. By assuming this Lemuria to have been man's primaeval home, we greatly facilitate the explanation of the geographical distribution of the human species by migration." 

At the time Haeckel was writing, the idea that there was a lost continent beneath the Indian Ocean made a lot of sense.  While the 19th century concept of Lemuria (named after the lemurs of Madagascar) usefully explained the discontinuous distributions of some plants and animals, 20th century seafloor exploration and knowledge of plate tectonics showed that no such sunken landmass exists.  There was no Lemuria, and the existence of such a place cannot be used to credibly frame ideas about human evolution and, consequently, the meanings of biological and linguistic variability among human populations.

This falsification of the idea of Lemuria is science in action. As racist as Haeckel was, I bet that he still would have adjusted his ideas about human evolution in the face of direct fossil evidence or the knowledge that there was no such thing as Lemuria. In regards the "paradise" of Lemuria, Haeckel (1887:325) acknowledged that

"I must premise the remark that, in the present state of our anthropological knowledge, any answer to this question must be regarded only as a provisional hypothesis."   

In the absence of direct evidence, it is possible to construct multiple narratives to explain the past and what it has to do with the present. The lack of direct evidence allows many mutually-exclusive ideas to be simultaneously regarded as credible.  Science works by developing lines of evidence that allows some of those ideas to be tested and potentially falsified. This is why Lemuria was a fine idea in the late 1800's but is a nonsense one now.  And this is why what we now know about human evolution and variation shows Haeckel's ideas about different human "species" as the inherently racist constructs that they are.  

Science works by letting facts kill ideas. Lemuria went down in smoke a long time ago, as did the idea that there are deep biological/cognitive differences between modern human populations. If you are holding on to either of these ideas, you should ask yourself why.