What is known about the Pacifid?
Pacifida or Pasifida (from Pacific - Pacific Ocean), also the Continent of Mu - a hypothetically lost continent in the Pacific Ocean.
The Europeans searched in vain for the mysterious Terra Incognita Australis - the Unknown Southern Land. Instead of the mainland, they discovered tens and hundreds of large and small islands, coral and volcanic, inhabited and uninhabited. Many of the islands were inhabited by people who spoke similar languages, had the same culture, worshiped the same gods. Could these islands be fragments of a sunken continent? Perhaps the Pacific Ocean also had its own Atlantis? Just call it Paficida.
Hypotheses about the Pacific
The famous French navigator and scientist Dumont-Durville was the first to substantiate the hypothesis of the Pacifid, although the thought of the continent sank under the water occurred to many captains who sailed in the waters of the Pacific Ocean, starting with Pedro Quiros, called the "Columbus of Australia".
The compatriot of Dumont-D'Urville, the researcher Morenhut, supported the data of geography, volcanology, geology, collected by him legends and myths. According to these myths and legends, a huge inhabited land once perished in the waters of the Pacific Ocean. This was the beginning of the hypothesis of the Pacifid, the debate about which has not ceased to this day. As our knowledge about the land and inhabitants of Oceania grew, more and more arguments appeared in favor of the disappeared Pacifis.
In the second half of the 19th century, two prominent evolutionary scientists - Alfred Wallace and Thomas Huxley - came up with the hypothesis that the population of Oceania is the descendants of one "Oceanic" race. This race inhabited the continent that has now sunk in the Pacific Ocean. That is why the Tasmanians, the Papuans of New Guinea, and the dark-skinned inhabitants of the interior regions of Melanesia, who were unfamiliar with navigation, ended up on their islands.
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The hypothesis of the Pacifid was also supported by geologists. The beginning was laid by the capital monograph of the Austrian scientist E. Suess "Face of the Earth", published at the end of the nineteenth century and giving a powerful impetus to the development of geology of the XX century. Russian geologist I. R. Lukashevich compiled a series of maps of the Pacifida showing the dynamics of its changes up to the present time, when only the islands and islets of Oceania remained from the mainland. The French geologist E. Ogues placed the Pacific continent in the central part of the ocean.
Mainland Pacific - Mu - before and after
That which cannot be … is! Why?
The hypotheses about the Pacifid were warmly supported by zoogeographers. Assuming the existence of a continent in the Pacific Ocean, many mysteries of zoogeography can be easily explained. Why are there freshwater fish on the Marquesas Islands, which are located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, as well as on the island of New Zealand, where the galaxis fish, which cannot tolerate salty sea water, live? Why do huge iguana lizards live on the islands of Fiji and Galapagos, which are surrounded on all sides by ocean waters? The islands of Fiji are inhabited by agama lizards, small boas and frogs that cannot tolerate swimming in the ocean. The Polynesian archipelagos of Samoa and Tonga, located even further from the shores of the Old World, are home to lizards and boas. The islands of Oceania are inhabited by different types of beetles, spiders, mollusks, worms, butterflies, typical of America or Asia. How could they be there, if not over the land bridge,that once connected the islands with the continents? Or this "bridge" was itself a mainland.
In addition to the data of zoogeography, there are also data from phytogeography, the science of the distribution of plants. So, in Polynesia, Asian, American and Australian species coexist. The Hawaiian Islands have flora from North America, Australia, South America, Indonesia, Polynesia and Antarctica!
The pacifida is a zoogeographic reality!
All these data were summarized by the founder of the science of zoogeography, academician M. A. Menzbir in the book "Secrets of the Great Ocean" (1923), in which the author arguably proves that Pacifida is a zoogeographic reality, while her death did not occur in the distant past, but literally in front of people. “Objective data from science tell us that the Great Ocean is not as ancient as one might think,” Menzbier writes. - In its tropical part, it appears to have formed not earlier than the Miocene. But also later, much later, when not only a man appeared, but reached a certain degree of culture, numerous islands rose in the bosom of his waters."
The next year, another book was published, which bore a similar title - "The Secret of the Pacific Ocean." The ethnographer Macmillan Brown in this work argues that Easter Island is the remnant of the Pacifis, a continent inhabited by a cultured and numerous people who died in the disaster. In support of his hypothesis, he cites a variety of facts related to the culture of Easter Island, which the scientist visited personally. These are the legends of the islanders about the sunken earth: giant statues and platforms, the construction of which, according to Brown, required no less labor than during the construction of the Egyptian pyramids. These are hieroglyphic writing and unique rites; they are cobbled roads that run across the island and drop abruptly off the ocean, and abandoned tools are a sure sign of an unexpected disaster that interrupted work on the island.
A. Kondratov