what differentiates a country to a continent? It can’t be the amount of countries bc of Australia and Antarctica. It can’t be population bc of Antarctica. Is it size?
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Countries are defined by themselves. There is an organization (generally a government) that claims sovereignty(right to rule/control) over a certain area. It doesn’t matter how many people there are or how much land it covers, just that no one with more power contests their claim to rule.
Continents are broader map boundaries which were mostly set during a period before we understood geology that well. Europe/Asia/Africa is probably the best example of this as it really doesn’t align with geology or plate tectonics. The original split of these three continents dates back to Ancient Greece and about 600 BC where they split Africa off as west of the Nile, Asia was east of the Nile, south east of the Hellespont (aka current day Istanbul), and south/east of the Phasis river that joins the black sea, everything north and west was “Europe”
Unfortunately those definitions lived on for millennia so even though we now know that India and the Arabian Peninsula are each on their own plate and Europe and the rest of Asia ride the Eurasian plate its too late to go back and update every text written since the founding of Rome
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