Why Europe is considered its own continent when it doesn’t really fit the definition of one?

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Why Europe is considered its own continent when it doesn’t really fit the definition of one?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Lots of map making stuff was done in Europe when we didn’t understand how all this worked yet. People saw a rough divide somewhere between Asia and Europe and assumed it’s a different part. It didn’t help that culture and skin color also changed roughly along those lines. So, back then it was called a continent and just never reclassified. Changing something so engrained is hard, especially when there are politics, cultural identity, race identity (fuck those) etc involved too.

Now, while lines on a map are largely arbitrary, you also need to differentiate between the concept of continent for classification in a political/cultural sense (where separating Europe into it’s own “area” can make sense) and the sciency sense where it doesn’t (on the scale of continents and continental plates at least).

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