Obligatory Map Men: https://youtu.be/hrsxRJdwfM0
Afroeurasia is a continent. The only thing separating Africa from Asia is the Suez canal which is manmade.
Same goes for the Americas - the Panama canal is manmade.
Europe and India are Asian subcontinents. The only reason Europe is considered a full continent is white people made the definitions.
they made the definitions before they'd invented white people though. IIRC this nomenclature comes from the ancient greeks. it's very ancient european cope.
the names and boundaries of continents are arbitrary and don't matter. that said, the most common definition, really more of a vibe, of a continent is size. Europe is 3 times larger than India. It's twice as large as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and Afghanistan combined.
Bold move including Russia as part of Europe considering how the europeans have been acting (without western russia europe is 2x the size of India).
I don't think Europe or the West as a geopolitical force is the same as the continent. There are other areas that are unambiguously in Europe that aren't part of "Europe" similarly to how Russia isn't. Are Belarus, Bosnia, Serbia, or Moldova really part of the club the way France and Germany are? Of course not. Greece or Hungary arguably aren't either.
Greece or Hungary arguably aren't either.
not gonna argue that, greece relative to europe occupies the position of peurto rico relative to the US.
I just think that the self-concept of europe is chauvinist and it's more of desired boundary than anything real, and calling it 'a continent' gives it legitimacy that it does not deserve.
Every continental boundary is more of a desired boundary than anything real. There are no "real" continents.
I can't disagree with wanting to delegimitize it
I was under the impression that continent boundaries were defined by tectonic plates. Is that not correct?
There's way more tectonic plates than continents and a lot of landmasses we think of as contiguous are on different plates. Itd be very impractical to try to make them the same. Iceland would be a transcontinental country, California would be its own continent, Asia would be several continents, there would be continents that are just patches of the Pacific Ocean or the Caribbean, and so on
It's a bit offensive to associate Asia, such a wonderful continent with those barbaric savages in its western peninsula.
While we’re at it, we may as well make it 4 continents: Afro-Eurasia, the Americas, Australia, and Antarctica. I think there’s even an argument for combining Afro-Eurasia and the Americas too, since it’s just one big contiguous landmass during ice ages. This has important biological consequences for the historic exchange of humans and other animals via Beringia. It also makes it easier to understand the close linguistic and genetic relationships between Siberian peoples and Native Americans. I hope you have enjoyed this argument for why a 3 continent world mental model is good, actually
Why stop there? After we rule 85% of the world's land area to belong to just one continent, why split the remaining 15% of Earth's land in two? That seems awfully imbalanced to me. So I rule that we should just merge Oceania and Antarctica together into the great continent of "Antherest" — after all, the Maori were quite likely the first people to discover Antarctica; Antarctica itself is just an archipelago with the appearance of a contiguous landmass due to its ice (which might not last); and there aren't really any people on Antarctica to object to being merged with Oceania.
honestly the eur part of eurasia is too good for the "europeans", the continient they live on is called asia
We've always been at war with Eurasia.
