Experts from the London Museum of natural history examined the remains of animals and one of a kind rock painting of the extinct lemur, found in Madagascar. The study confirmed that this island in ancient times was the land of giants.
the research Report is given on the website of the Museum. Science knows that Madagascar was inhabited by giant animals. In particular, this island wandered a huge bird, much surpassing in size the ostriches. And the forests were inhabited by several species of giant lemurs that were the size of gorillas.
Reliable information about exactly when these extinct beings, no. Some researchers claimed that they met in the XIX century. The more popular hypothesis States that the giants were extinct shortly before the arrival on the island of the people or after a very short time after their appearance.
In the new study proves that the huge birds and animals can coexist with humans until relatively recently. This is indicated, for example, a cave painting found in a local cave. It represents the world’s only picture of a giant lemur. This means that the ancient writer saw who painted.
in addition, in the remote Western forests, scientists were able to find and explore the bones of giant lemurs. Radiocarbon Dating showed that they died around 1000 years ago. Science has no consensus on the date of settlement of the island people. Some suggest that this happened about 10 thousand years ago. Recently, however, there is increasing evidence that humans appeared on the island about 2000 years ago, and they had sailed from Indonesia.
Experts have compared the technique of petroglyphs in Madagascar with other ancient images around the world. It turned out that the artists on the island used symbols that were previously found only in one place on Earth – the cave of Borneo, which is 7,500 kilometers from Madagascar.
“Rock the characters on the island of Borneo about 2000 years, explains the study’s lead author Julian Hume. – That is, they were created around the same time as the first Indonesians arrived in Madagascar. Maybe they brought those symbols with them. This means that the drawings in a cave in Madagascar can be from 1,000 to 2,000 years.”
by the Way, other images in this cave is also dedicated to the giant beings. So, the ancient Madagascar drew a bird, an elephant and a giant turtle, whose weight was up to one ton. Here was inhabited by huge crocodiles, the width of the skull which, presumably, reached 60-80 santimetrov.
as for the image of the lemur, the scientists suggest that the ancient people drew representative of an extinct species Babakotia radofilai. These animals distinguished from its congeners not only in appearance, a way of life they resembled sloths. Babakotia spent a lot of time in the hanging position, slowly moving from branch to branch.
of Madagascar located off the southeastern coast of continental Africa, and today is home to a variety of lemurs. As a rule, these small primates that nowhere in the world is no longer there. Currently, there are up to 100 species of lemurs. Today these animals on average weigh only a few pounds, but only a thousand years ago, the picture was probably quite different.
