Lemuria, and where the tradition puts it
Let us begin inside the teaching rather than outside it, and ask first what the esoteric sources actually say about where Mu lay.
Blavatsky, in the second volume of The Secret Doctrine, gives it a great reach. Lemuria runs from Madagascar through Ceylon and Sumatra, takes in Australia and Tasmania, and extends far into the Pacific beyond Easter Island. Northward it reaches further than is usually remembered. She writes that Sweden and Norway had formed part of ancient Lemuria on the European side, and that eastern and western Siberia and Kamchatka had belonged to it upon the Asiatic side. The Theosophical summaries of her geography run the continent from Tibet and Mongolia down to Ceylon before turning east to Australia and the Pacific and west to Madagascar. Australia, the islands of the Pacific, and a piece of what is now California she names as surviving fragments of that ground.
She is specific, too, about where in that great territory the Third Race finished its passage into solid physical bodies. She places that transformation in the northern regions, naming the Bering Straits and what dry land then stood in Central Asia, and notes that the climate was semi-tropical even in the Arctic in those days.
Steiner, reading the Akashic record for himself and publishing Cosmic Memory in 1904, sets it south of Asia, east of Africa, and north of Australia, and says the volcanic fire took that land.
Scott-Elliot published The Lost Lemuria in the same year, working from Leadbeater's clairvoyant sight, and printed maps of it: a vast southern continent spread across the Indian and Pacific oceans, reaching from the eastern coast of Africa across to South America.
Cayce, in trance, places Mu in the South Pacific, and names remnants of it both among the Pacific islands and in Lower California and the Death Valley country.
Kryon, through Lee Carroll, centres Lemuria upon Hawaii, holding the present islands to be the surviving peaks of it, and singles out Kauai.
The Telos material, through Aurelia Louise Jones, calls Lemuria the motherland, spread across the Pacific, and has its survivors entering the mountain at Shasta in northern California.
Six sources, given across a century and a quarter, by seers who worked in different countries, in different languages, under different teachers, and by methods they described differently. They differ at the edges. They argue about how far the land reached toward Africa and toward the Americas, and about where the last of it went under. They agree upon the ocean. Every one of them puts Mu in the Indian and Pacific world, and not one of them puts it anywhere else.
And inside that agreement, Blavatsky says one thing sharper than the rest.
She names the Australians as the only pure and direct descendants of the Third Race, and holds the remainder of humanity to be of mixed Lemuro-Atlantean descent. That was written in 1888.
Consider what the learning of her day would have counselled. Victorian anthropology ranked the peoples of the world and set the Australians at the bottom of its ranking. To assign the purest surviving line of an ancient humanity to them inverted the whole scale her contemporaries were using. Egypt was there for the taking, and India, and Tibet, and the Andes, each with ruins and prestige and an air of lost wisdom about it, each the obvious choice for anybody assembling a story meant to be believed. She named the one people her age held in least regard.
Which sets the question this part of the book is asking. If the Third Race left descendants among the living, where in the genome are they?
The Denisovans
In 2008 a fragment of a child's finger bone came out of Denisova Cave, in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia. In 2010 the team under Svante Paabo drew a genome from it, and that genome belonged to a kind of human nobody had known. They were named for the cave. Sixteen years afterward the physical remains still amount to very little: a few teeth, a jaw and a rib from a cave upon the Tibetan plateau, and a jawbone that a fishing trawler brought up from the sea floor off Taiwan. The type specimen of an entire kind of human being is a fingertip.
So the Denisovans are a people known almost entirely from the DNA they left in the living, who happen also to have yielded a reference genome. How that kind of detection works is set out in Part Three, where it does the heavier work; here the outline is enough. Stretches of DNA in living people can be identified as foreign, dated, and matched against sequenced archaic genomes when such genomes exist.
The first question the Denisovan genome settled was where they stood in relation to ourselves and to the Neanderthals. Lay the three side by side, count the places where they differ, and the Denisovan comes out nearer to the Neanderthal than either of them stands to us. Two lineages, sharing an ancestor with one another more recently than either shares one with our own line. Neither is our ancestor. They are cousins, and they are cousins to each other.
We can put a floor under when the western branch went west, because a heap of skeletons in a cave shaft in northern Spain, four hundred and thirty thousand years old, is already on the Neanderthal side of that divide.
And that is why the Denisovans were the natural place to begin. They had a name, a sequence, and a measured distribution across the living world. And nobody had matched them to anything at all in the esoteric record. An unclaimed people, with their evidence already gathered.
The first question was which Race, and geography answers it without difficulty.
Denisovan haplotypes, meaning blocks of DNA inherited whole and recognisable as coming from that people, fall below detection in Europe. Across most of Asia they run at a fraction of one percent. And then, in one region, they rise sharply: New Guinea, Aboriginal Australia, and the Negrito peoples of the Philippines, where they reach some five percent of the genome.
That is the Indian and Pacific ocean world. That is where the tradition places Mu.
The Denisovans may be the Lemurians.
That is the supposition this part of the book works from. What follows is the expansion, going back and forth between the two bodies of evidence to see how far the agreement carries.
The map answers on two counts
The Denisovan bones lie in the Altai of southern Siberia, on the Tibetan plateau at Baishiya, and in the Taiwan Strait. Every one of those sites falls inside the Lemuria Blavatsky drew, and the two oldest of them, the Altai and Tibet, fall in the Central Asian north where she places the making of the physical Third Race.
The living inheritance points to the other end of the same continent. Denisovan DNA falls below detection in Europe. Across most of Asia it runs at a fraction of one percent. In New Guinea, in Aboriginal Australia, and among the Negrito peoples of the Philippines it rises to about five percent of the genome, which is the highest archaic fraction carried by anybody now living, higher than any population's Neanderthal share anywhere on earth.
So the bones sit toward the north of Lemuria and the descendants sit in its tropical heart, and both lie within the one continent as the seers described it.
And the split between them has a plain physical cause. Bone keeps in cold dry northern caves and perishes in wet tropical ground, where everything organic goes with it: wood, fibre, hide, cordage, boats, houses. A maritime people build almost wholly in materials that rot. So the northern Lemurians left remains and the southern Lemurians left none, and the difference records what the ground did with them rather than where the people were.
And the people Blavatsky singled out in 1888, against the whole grain of her age, are the people carrying the most.
There was no Denisovan then to be right or wrong about. There was no way to measure archaic ancestry in anybody, and there would be none for a hundred and twenty years. Nothing in the science of her day pointed toward Australia, and a good deal in the prejudice of her day pointed away from it.
So far as I can see, that one came by divination and by nothing else.
Why the bones are in the wrong country
The Denisovan ancestry maximum is in New Guinea and the Philippines. The Denisovan fossils are in the Altai, in Tibet, and one jaw a trawler pulled off Taiwan. The population that actually did the interbreeding, the one that put five percent into Papuans, has yielded no bone anywhere in the region it must have occupied. It exists as a signal in its descendants and nothing else.
Taphonomy accounts for that without special pleading. Cold dry karst in the Altai holds readable DNA in a finger bone for eighty thousand years. Humid tropical lowland destroys bone in a few thousand, and destroys wood, fibre, hide, cordage and boats in less, which is the entire material culture of a maritime people. And at the last glacial maximum the coastline lay a hundred and twenty metres lower, across a subcontinent, Sundaland, joining Sumatra and Java and Borneo to the mainland. The sea did not cover that landscape. It took it. Whoever lived on it is under the Java Sea.
So the fossil distribution maps preservation conditions rather than habitation, and the conditions permitted preservation only in the north. For a homeland described as warm, coastal, maritime and finally drowned, genetic loudness with physical silence is the expected signature. A tidy row of tropical skeletons would be the anomaly.
And why the living in those countries carry so little
A geneticist will ask why, if the Denisovans lived in the Altai and on the Tibetan plateau, the people there now carry so little of them.
Because an ancestry percentage measures how much came in and how recently, rather than how nearly a people stands to the source. Recombination cuts inherited blocks smaller every generation, so a contribution received early is by now scattered into fragments, while one received late still sits there in long pieces. The Papuan introgression is the latest anywhere, arriving around thirty thousand years ago, which is why it stands out so plainly.
The northern peoples carry an older and quieter layer, worn down by the time that has passed over it. The Tibetan altitude variant is a Denisovan haplotype, a block of DNA passed down entire, still doing its work, and it is recognised precisely by its age. So the inheritance is there in the north as well, and what differs is how long it has been weathering.
Fire
Blavatsky does not say that Lemuria burned as an item of news. She states it as a law. At the close of every root race there comes a cataclysm, in turn by fire or water. Alternating. Fire, then water, then fire.
Steiner gives the Lemurian half in detail: a land thin and undermined everywhere by volcanic forces, mighty volcanoes almost everywhere, destroyed in the end by that fire.
Now put the Denisovans on a map.
Their world is Island Southeast Asia and the western Pacific rim. That is the Ring of Fire. Not merely volcanic: the most volcanically active ground on the surface of this planet, and it has been for the entire span in which the lineage existed. Toba, in Sumatra, the largest eruption in two million years, detonated in the middle of the Denisovan homeland.
And consider what would have had to be known to arrange that. Plate tectonics was not accepted by geologists until the 1960s; before then continental drift was a crank position. In 1888 there was no Ring of Fire in the modern sense, and no reason on earth to associate the western Pacific margin with volcanism. The correspondence was not available to be built.
Lemuria was not one people
Blavatsky divides every Root Race into seven sub-races, and Scott-Elliot, working from Leadbeater's clairvoyant reading, does the same. The sub-races are peoples in their own right, with their own countries and their own periods. Scott-Elliot names the seventh Lemurian sub-race as the stock from which the Atlantean nucleus was drawn.
So the Denisovans could only ever have been one branch of Lemuria, and most of the Race left us nothing we can presently see.
The genetics gives the same picture.
Archaic haplotypes, the blocks of DNA that pass down whole and so appear in a population as recurring units, are pulled out of the genomes of living people. Their divergence is measured to give a separation time, and their length is measured to date their arrival. Applied to Papuans, that analysis recovers haplotypes from two distinct Denisovan lineages whose separation from one another sits at more than three hundred and fifty thousand years, meaning those two donor populations had been apart from each other for that long before either of them met our ancestors. A third Denisovan lineage, distinct again, turns up by the same method in East Asians.
Several Denisovan peoples, long divided, each feeding a different set of living descendants. That is a finding from sequence, arrived at by geneticists with no interest in Root Races.