Sparrow & Dove

In any group of geography nerds, one of the biggest peeves will be “Europe’s not a continent”. From this perspective, Europe is just a peninsula of Asia, and the listing of Europe in the seven traditional continents (Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia/Oceania, Europe, North America, South America) is just a result of Eurocentric bias.

This isn’t an unreasonable view – “continent” doesn’t really have a set definition, but a common one is “large area of land surrounded by water”. By this definition, Australia and Antarctica definitely fit and North and South America nearly do, as does Africa. Asia and Europe are then the weirdos, since they share a long, indefinite land border somewhere in the Urals. So you redefine this as one big continent, Eurasia, and then everything just about works.

But there’s another problem. By population, the continents are uneven. There are about 1.2 billion Africans, 750 million Europeans, 600 million North Americans, 400 million South Americans and 40 million Oceanians. That adds up to just about 3 billion people. The other 4.2 billion people on this planet all live in Asia. More people live in Asia than live in all the other continents combined. Adding Europe to the mix gives Eurasia a total population of 5 billion, or around 70% of the world’s population. What’s the point of dividing the world into continents if you’re going to have one continent with almost everyone?

In fact, what’s the point of dividing the world into continents at all?

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