Sun­da­land Archive For­mat Down­loads by Dhani Irwan­to

Thank you to Dhani for your won­der­ful con­tri­bu­tion

Sundaland by Dhani Irwanto

Sun­da­land is a bio-geo­graph­i­cal region of South­east­ern Asia which encom­pass­es the Sun­da Shelf, the part of the Asian con­ti­nen­tal shelf that was exposed dur­ing the Last Ice Age. It includ­ed the Malay Penin­su­la on the Asian main­land, as well as the large islands of Kali­man­tan, Java and Sumat­era, and their sur­round­ing islands.

Sun­da­land is in the trop­ics, sur­round­ed by oceans, and with­in the Ring of Fire. Ben­e­fit­ting from the heavy pre­cip­i­ta­tion, vol­canic deposits in Sun­da­land devel­op into some of the rich­est forestry and agri­cul­tur­al lands, and devel­oped into some of the rich­est fau­na on Earth.

The vast major­i­ty of schol­ars accept that every liv­ing human being is descend­ed from a small group in Africa, who then dis­persed into the wider world. Archae­o­log­i­cal and fos­sil evi­dence sup­port an ear­ly migra­tion of mod­ern humans left Africa and fol­lowed the coast­lines of Africa, Ara­bia, India and Sun­da­land. After migrat­ing from the semi-desert­ed savan­nas of Africa, man first found a place in Sun­da­land where food was abun­dant and it was there that they left hunter-gath­er­er cul­ture and invent­ed farm­ing, agri­cul­ture, trad­ing and civ­i­liza­tion, which made human­i­ty first flour­ished. All this took place dur­ing the Last Glacial peri­od.

The sea lev­els con­tin­ued to rise grad­u­al­ly to peak lev­els about 5,500 years ago, caus­ing land loss on trop­i­cal coasts with flat con­ti­nen­tal shelves. Cracks in the earth’s crust as the weight of the ice shift­ed to the seas set off cat­a­stroph­ic events com­pound­ed by earth­quakes, vol­cano erup­tions, super waves and floods drowned the coastal cul­tures and all the flat con­ti­nen­tal shelves of South­east Asia, and wiped out many pop­u­la­tions. As the sea rolled in, there was a mass migra­tion from the sink­ing con­ti­nent. Genet­ic stud­ies show that there has been a sharp decline in the pop­u­la­tion of the world, and pop­u­la­tion turnovers from South­east, East and South Asia to Europe, Near East and the Cau­ca­sus begin­ning at the the end of the Younger Dryas peri­od.

The Younger Dryas dis­as­ters are also doc­u­ment­ed as leg­ends, myths or tales in almost every region on Earth, observ­able with tremen­dous sim­i­lar­i­ties. They are com­mon across a wide range of cul­tures, extend­ing back into Bronze Age and Neolith­ic pre­his­to­ry. The over­whelm­ing con­sis­ten­cy among leg­ends and myths of flood and the repop­u­la­tion of man from a flood hero sim­i­lar to the Noah Flood are found in dis­tant parts of the Earth. The myths sim­i­lar to the Gar­den of Eden, Par­adise or Divine Land echo among the pop­u­la­tions around the world. Mem­o­ries of their ori­gin are doc­u­ment­ed in their leg­ends, such as the sto­ries of Atlantis, Nesers­er, Land of Punt, Land of Ophir, Kumari Kan­dam, Kangdez and Taprobana. Pyra­mids spread in many parts of the world and emerged sep­a­rate­ly from one anoth­er by oceans who sup­pos­ed­ly nev­er dis­cov­ered each other’s exis­tence. Those indi­cate that they were derived from a com­mon ori­gin. Fur­ther, scholas­tic belief by ety­mol­o­gists and lin­guists are pos­i­tive that all world lan­guages sprang from a com­mon source.