p Although the Solomon Islands in Melanesia and the African continent are thousands of miles apart, inhabitants of these two places look so much alike that even expert anthropologists have difficulty telling them apart.

p The whole of tropical Africa is inhabited by the Negroid, or Equatorial, race. We also find members of this race far away at the other end of the Indian Ocean—on the Australian continent, in New Guinea, and in the jungles of the Malay Peninsula. How did they become so widely separated? Why is the earliest population of Madagascar Island closer to the Melanesians than to the inhabitants of the nearby east coast of Africa? And why does Malagasy, the language of the present-day inhabitants of Madagascar, have more kinship with the language of the inhabitants of Easter Island than with the languages of the African continent?

p Why do the fauna and flora of Madagascar show Indian rather than African affinities? Why does every large subdivision of the Equatorial race include a dwarf branch? There are the pygmy tribes of Africa, the dark-skinned pygmy peoples of the Malay Peninsula and the Philippine Islands, the pygmy tribes in the mountainous regions of New Guinea and, finally, the tiny inhabitants of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, who are still in the Stone Age. Could these be the remnants of a once enormous dwarf branch that inhabited Africa, Southern Asia and Oceania? The Negroids of Africa and Oceania are separated by the expanses of the Indian Ocean. The Asian continent, the vast land area between Africa and Oceania, is inhabited by members of 122 two other big races, the European and the Mongoloid. True, there are some Equatorial pockets here. In central India there are the Munda, Negroid tribes that are among the country’s earliest inhabitants, and in Southern India there are the dark-skinned Dravidians, whose origin is a mystery to science.

p The greatest controversy, however, centres round the Tamils, a Dravidian people with a distinctive culture. Scholars have named various countries, and even continents, as the original home of the Tamils. The Tamils themselves, or their historians, to be more exact, believed that in the remote past the Tamil homeland was situated in the southern part of Nawalam, a large island that was one of the first land masses to arise near the equator, and that Lemuria, a lost continent considered to be the cradle of civilisation, was part of the same region.

p Tamil scholars believed Lemuria to be the northern projection of Gondwana, a vast continent now lying at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

p Other Indian legends speak of Ruta and Daitia, countries that also sank into the ocean.

p Geologists have advanced a hypothesis that a great land bridge once connected India and Africa. The long, steep projection of the Eastern , and Western Ghats, the mountain ranges that separate India from the ocean, suggests that land subsidence on a vast scale once took place here. Volcanic lava reaches down into the ocean to a depth of nearly one kilometre. It is possible that the sea floor was once land, and the Ghats arose when this land sank to the bottom of the Indian Ocean to the west of the mountains. Many geologists are of the opinion that the whole of the Indian subcontinent is a vast, flat chunk of 123 land left over from a land mass whose western part sank into the ocean, while the Island of Ceylon, in its turn, is part of the subcontinent.

p In the Bombay area there is a submerged forest. Furthermore, the very appearance of the coast is weighty evidence, geologists say, in favour of the theory that land there sank below the waves not long ago. Traces of land subsidence are also found along both the eastern and western coasts of Southern India.

p Many geographers of antiquity, the famous Ptolemy among them, believed the Indian Ocean to be a huge lake, surrounded by land on all sides. Do the land areas depicted on ancient maps now lie at the bottom of the Indian Ocean?

p The dispersion of peoples throughout the world went on for thousands of years, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of years. Naturally, big geological changes, such as land subsidence or, on the contrary, land elevation, could have taken place in this time.

Perhaps the riddles of the dispersion of the Equatorial race can be logically explained if we assume that there was once a land bridge between India and Africa, and even between Africa and Australia. After all, modern geological data show that the entire coastline of South-East Asia is slowly sinking into the ocean. Perhaps this process of subsidence once proceeded much faster and on a much broader scale.