European discoveries of continents

The term “continent” refers to a continuous mass of land separated from others of its kind by water; the original designation came from the Latin terra continens, or “connected land.” In reality, this technical definition is not often adhered to, and Westerners instead use “continent” to refer to one of the seven major, traditional landmasses: Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South America, Australia, and Antarctica. The story of how the continents all came to be known parallels the story of European civilization and discovery.

Background

The continents have been viewed differently at various periods in Western history. For millennia, several of the seven continents now recognized—North America, South America, Australia, and Antarctica—remained unknown to Europe. Only in the sixteenth and seventeenth century after many years of exploration, did Europeans’ worldview evolve enough to encompass the concept of there being so many continents.

Even many centuries later, though, there is still room for disagreement about how many continents there are and where their boundaries are. In addition to the seven-continent model, there are models that assert there are four continents (Afro-Eurasia, America, Antarctica, and Australia), five (like the four-continent model but with the separation of Africa and Eurasia), or six (either considering North and South America separately and merging Europe and Asia into Eurasia, or combining the Americas and separating Europe and Asia).

Continents Today

The geological definition of a continent includes not only the landmass above sea level but also the tectonic plate upon which it floats, as well as perhaps the continental shelf extending out from the shoreline. Despite that, the common conception of the continents is the culturally derived product of generations of colloquial usage rather than an awareness of the geographic configuration of the earth. This is demonstrated by the almost total lack of correspondence between the definition of the term and the way it has been applied. For example, Europe and Asia are not separated by a body of water and are in fact on the same tectonic plate, but they have usually been considered as separate continents because of the sharp cultural differences between their inhabitants. Similarly, Australia has been designated as a continent, but Greenland, nearly one-third as large, has been relegated to the status of an island.

The origins of the popular Western concept of continents can be traced back to the sixth century BCE in ancient Greece. At that time, because travel was so difficult and dangerous, for most Greeks, the entire world consisted of the Mediterranean Sea and the lands that bordered it. Thus, in the ancient world, there were only three continents: Africa (then known as Libya), Europe, and Asia. The only reason Europe and Asia were seen as different is because they met at the Bosporus Strait near the Aegean Sea. The two were initially said to split at the Caucasus Mountains, later at the Ural Mountains.

Many centuries later, in the sixteenth and seventeenth century CE, when European explorers such as Christopher Columbus managed to reach distant lands by ship, European awareness of world geography expanded. Even after Columbus reached the Americas, for a number of years, it was commonly believed that the previously unknown land was part of Asia. Starting with Martin Waldseemüller’s in 1507, world maps began to reflect the reality that the Pacific Ocean lay between the Americas and Asia, and by the end of the century the number of continents represented as the known world increased from three to four or even five, depending on whether the cartographer considered North and South America as a single continent or separate continents. This conception lasted until the around 1606, when Europeans became aware of the existence of Australia, increasing the number of known continents to five or six, again depending on one’s view of the Americas.

Although the ancient Greeks and Romans had speculated about its existence and early modern European cartographers included a representation of it in their maps, Antarctica remained unspotted for more than two hundred years after the first Europeans landed in Australia. It was finally sighted in 1820 but was not typically granted continent status until the latter half of the twentieth century. By the twenty-first century, it was sometimes classified along with New Zealand and other Pacific islands as Oceania.

Continents are as much culturally defined as they are physically or geographically, so too is the subcontinent, which has been thought of as a smaller version of a continent. Usually an area is designated as a subcontinent when it is distinct from surrounding features or when it rests upon a different tectonic plate from adjoining formations. Different ethnic groups, languages, religions, and lifeways may characterize the subcontinent as distinct from its neighbors. Examples of such areas include the Indian subcontinent (of Asia), Greenland (a subcontinent of North America), and the Arabian Peninsula (also a subcontinent of Asia).

Bibliography

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