Lemuria 

Lemuria  :  was thought by some to be the cradle of humankind.  The assumption for this arose in the 1860's by the supporters of Darwinian Theory who felt that the discontinuous distribution of a group of species called prosimians needed to be reconciled.  

In order to do this a number of possibilities were muted including, the notion that Africa, Madagascar, India and South East Asia had been connected by a continent bridging the Indian ocean where the first prosimians where thought to live.  As with Atlantis  it was thought that this continent sank thus leading to the strange geographic dispersal of the prosimians.

The group of animals called prosimians encompass around 20 different species of lemur which tend to be found only on Madagascar and some smaller offshore islands.  Strangely their closest relatives are the lorises of South-east Asia and the Indian subcontinent; and the bushbabies and pottos of tropical Africa.   To explain this anomoly zoologists suggested that there was once a continent called Lemuria, which sank leaving the species at some distance from each other and separated by water.