The next post will be about Europa, so before I got to that I thought I’d mention Europe in connection with the idea of continents generally.
I would say there are six continents: Afrika, South and North America, Eurasia, Australia (Oceania) and Antarctica. Sometimes Afro-Eurasia and the Americas are considered single continents, and different countries disagree on how many there are. It’s the norm to separate Europe and Asia into two continents, but it’s also quite peculiar to do so for a couple of reasons.
The borders in the above map are the Caucasus and Ural mountains, and in fact the Urals in particular do mark a geological event. Laurasia collided with Kazakhstania in the Carboniferous Period. However, Europe has never existed as a separate landmass:
This is a world map of this planet in the late Carboniferous. The southern ice cap indicates that it was towards the end of that period. The continent crossing the Equator is Laurasia although it’s hardly recognisable as including Europe. The rest of Laurasia consists of Kalaalit Nunaat (Greenland) and North America. The Caucasus Mountains are the end of a chain stretching across Europe and interrupted by the Black Sea when Arabia collided with Eurasia as the Tethys closed in the Miocene. Hence the region we now call Europe used to be bounded by the Tethys and the Urals, but now has a land border. Even when it had a coastline along the Tethys, it was already part of Eurasia. North America and Eurasia began to part in the late Cretaceous and the process was complete by the start of the Eocene.
The Mediterranean islands are mainly considered part of Europe, but Cyprus is considered Asian. I presume this is because Cyprus is influenced by Turkey so strongly. In the Bronze Age, writing developed in Cyprus earlier than (the rest of) Europe, so Cyprus may tend to be less “backward” than Europe as a whole. However, at the time there seemed to be no concept of Europe and the hinterland of the Mediterranean was considered more important. Transport around the Med by boat was relatively easy due to its many islands and the proximity of the continental lands to each other. With the fluctuation in Saharan climate, the land would have been more hospitable and similar, although it takes longer than history to change.
As I mention tomorrow, one reason for the invention of Europe seems to have been to overcome the division between the eastern and western Roman Empires. I admit that I don’t understand how a name for an area of Thrace, almost in Asia, somehow ended up being applied to the whole of Europe. All that said, Europe is undoubtedly named after Europa, the wife of King Minos who was legendarily seduced/raped by Zeus in the form of a bull. Europa, as I will repeat tomorrow, means “broad face” but this may be a garbled etymology like our “sparrowgrass” for “asparagus” as her name might also be linked to Erebos, the personification of darkness, although how this happened is obscure. In fact I find the whole attribution of Europa’s name to Europe mysterious and contrived, even though it’s obviously named after her.
What of Asia? The Latin names “Africa” and “Asia” used to refer to provinces of the Roman Empire. Just in passing Africa Proconsularis was the former Carthage, conquered by the Romans, and comprised mainly a fairly thin strip of land in the area of present day Tunisia, Libya and Algeria. It was the second wealthiest province in the Empire after Italia, but the fact that it was a colonial power occupying part of Afrika seems to have been instrumental in the movement to spell the name of the continent with a K. I digress. There was Asia Minor, present day Turkey in Asia, and the lesser-known Asia Major, which seems to have been the rest of the known “continent” of Asia. Hence in a sense the words for all three “continents”, whereof Afrika alone is geologically real, are generalisations of relatively small areas in the Mediterranean region. The name Asia is lifted directly from the Greek Ἀσία, which may be from the Semitic “‘asu”, meaning “rising” or “light”. If so, it literally meant “land of the rising Sun”.
“Eurasia” is naturally a combination of the two names, originating in mid to late nineteenth century CE Germany. However, there’s also the ethnic term “Eurasian”, denoting someone of mixed European and Asian origin and initially referring to Anglo-Indians at around the same time. This brings up the issue of how Commonwealth and American English differ in their usage of the ethnic term “Asian”. In North America, “Asian” refers to people whose heritage is East Asian, but in Britain it refers to south Asians. Both of these are technically speaking hyponyms for who Asians actually are, because for example many Arabs are Asians, as are people originating in Siberia and Israel, and none of these are “Asian” in either sense. The Y-chromosomal haplogroup world map of Homo sapiens looks like this:
A few things need to be said about this map. Focussing on Y chromosomes makes it a map of paternity, but there’s also mitochondrial DNA, which traces only the maternal line, and autosomal, i.e. the rest of the chromosomes, which are more mixed. It is, however, notable that Europe in this map is fairly homogenous, although the type most distinctive of Europe also turns up in the Middle East and Central Asia as well as Tchad for some reason.
The human mitochondrial DNA groups map looks like this:
It’s notable here that the area around the Mediterranean, including Arabia, forms a unit which includes the north coast of Afrika, but it then blends into other groups to the east. This makes Russia and Europe into a kind of genetic unit, but South, East and Central Asia are different. Hence in human terms, going by the maternal line there’s a gradient in the north between Europe and the Med on one side to eastern Siberia on the other, but sharper divisions in the south. In particular, the Indian subcontinent, which was a continent in its own right until it reached Eurasia in the Eocene, is very much a discrete unit in those terms, so the word “subcontinent” is most appropriate here. As far as Y chromosomes are concerned, north India is Aryan and south India Dravidian, which is supported phenotypically and linguistically. Other chromosomes are of course available.
All that is of course fairly anthropocentric. There are also zoögeographical regions and geobotanic realms. An early map using this idea looks like this:
This seems pretty close to how it’s seen today, although I’ve also heard of a “Holarctic Region” which combines North America and Eurasia. Actual Arctic fauna are pretty much unified around the Arctic Ocean and there are the likes of bears, bison, wolves and so forth in both Eurasia and North America. From this perspective, either all of the land clustering around the North Pole plus the north of the Sahara constitutes one region or Eurasia and North Afrika do, except for India and Indochina. Individual species of animal are often referred to as “Eurasian”, such as the Eurasian beaver or Eurasian sparrowhawk. There are many of these. To some extent the fauna of the whole of north Eurasia and north Afrika can be expected to be quite similar, although many species will have smaller ranges within that and there is also migration between regions. This map also reflects the mitochondrial DNA distribution of our own species.
Floristic regions look like this, although it’s possible to be a lot more detailed. It’s notable that the flora of Southern Afrika, actually southern South Africa, is as distinctive as other much larger regions, and the most distinctive human population genetically is the San of southern Afrika, who can be as distantly related to each other as randomly selected members of our species outside that group and may have been separate for as long as our species has existed, with some interbreeding of course. Once again, looking at the rest of the land surface of the planet, there’s a Holarctic Region.
As I must’ve said before on this blog, I often think of the Americas not as the West but as the extreme far East, because the Bering Straits and the Pacific coast of the continents link them to the Pacific and East Asian regions. The connections between the two are evident in these maps. If we’re going to think of the planet in these terms, there’s a tendency for the North to be united and the South to be more disparate, and that makes sense, for example, closer to the Equator where a cylindrical projection can be misleading because it makes locations in the tropical belt look closer than they really are compared to the polar regions. There also seem to be physical barriers in the South such as oceans, and in the southern part of the Northern Hemisphere in the form of the narrow isthmus of Central America, the Sahara and the various mountain ranges of Asia. I notice here that I’m still calling it Asia. In all of these respects, although there are fairly sharp divisions within Eurasia, and within Afro-Eurasia, they don’t follow the actual boundaries between the alleged continents closely at all. Just as in the Greco-Roman world, the Med seems to be a more important region than Europe and the most significant “borders” are actually in central and southern Asia. That said, just as we recognise a difference between North and South America because of the narrow link between the two continents, we should likewise recogise that the Sinai region represents a border between Eurasia and Afrika. Arabia is a little ambiguous in this schema though. It’s also notable, incidentally, that both of these regions have significant canals, which would be unnecessary to trade and shipping had the Tethys still existed. Separation between continents seems to be marked by bottlenecks of land. There is of course no such bottleneck between Europe and Asia. Hence Eurasia.
All that said, the idea of Eurasia can be used negatively. The Eurasian Economic Union comprises the former Soviet states and has similarities with the European Union. It seems to build on an older idea of Russia as a Eurasian territory rather than a European one. The Eurasia Movement is another Russian idea which opposes American liberalism and capitalism but mixes it with the values of the Russian Orthodox Church. Whatever its values, Eurasianism reflects the apparent reality that Russia occupies the greater part of the Eurasian continent and the Urals are in a sense merely a mountain range within that country. It makes the concept of Russia less Slavic. Neo-Eurasianism sees the country as more Asian than European, which is geometrically true, and to some extent the above also corresponds to the scientifically-established divisions seen in the other maps on this post. However, sociology is usually flawed when it considers itself akin to the natural sciences, and this is actually divisive compared to a more cosmopolitan version of the concept of Eurasia.
My general aim in discussing this issue is to undermine the “specialness” of Europe. Although Europe can be seen as a bastion of liberal democracy, and to be honest the idea of living in most of the rest of Eurasia is quite forbidding to me, it can also be seen as a kind of White fortress hoarding the wealth and resources plundered from the rest of the planet. That said, I thoroughly consider myself as Northwestern European and I have to say that my perception of much of the rest of the continent is as illiberal, sexist, homophobic and so forth, and I would be afraid to live far outside my hexagon, so I suppose I’m just a creature of my own geography. Nonetheless, I think it makes sense not to regard Europe as a continent at all, because if we don’t, we may become more concerned with those very illiberal and anti-progressive tendencies which are going on in the rest of the continent or Eurasia.
Hence I’m going to stick with my initial urge and say that there is no continent of Europe. There is a vast continent called Eurasia. To its west is an unusually large peninsula and a number of archpelagoes and more isolated islands, and there’s the Mediterranean, around which similar lands cluster. We blend ethnically into people to the south and east, unlike many other people on the continent who are much more discrete than we are. But at the same time we need to be wary of the idea of a Eurasian identity being used for imperialist ends. Nonetheless, we live on a peninsula called Europe, or rather on one of its islands in our case, and that peninsula is part of Eurasia.
A Box Of Chocolates 