Kumari Kandham

Kumari Kandham

The evidence of a steep but gradual sea level rise in the first five millennia of the Holocene force us to consider the possibility that many settled and populated areas were swallowed by the ocean, and that only those populations which moved to higher grounds were able to survive. That accounts for the traditions preserved in South India about the vanished continent of Kumari Kandam that some have identified with legendary Lemuria, and also for the discovery of extensive urban ruins, more than 8000 years old, under the water of the Gulf of Khambat and Arabian Sea off the coasts of Gujarat and Saurashtra. Tamil civilization traces its origins back to the once emerged lands which now lie beneath the Indian Ocean to the west of Sri Lanka, and the earliest known Dravidian royal dynasty, the House of Pandya, claimed to have ruled over Kumari Kandam and that could only have been before the sea level rise, i.e., prior to the seventh millennium BCE.