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Comment by pritovido | Hacker News Reader

You can consider Europe and Asia the same portion of land, aka a continent, hence Euroasia as a continent, because it is, there is no big amounts of water in between.

This is used in Archeology because humans could travel easily across the same pieces of land. E.g 10.000 years ago humans could cross easily the English channel because it did not exist as the water level was way lower.

There are barriers that isolate parts of Europe and Asia, like desserts and mountains, but very early there were determined humans that crossed them.

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As a good example of this, the peoples who now call themselves Europeans are descended from central Asians who exterminated (entirely on the male line, mostly on the female)[1] the prior indigenous European population about 4500 years ago. The Eurasian continent's geography is conducive to large scale migrations of people over relatively short time periods. The suspected proto-indo-european migration that is the suspected ancestor group of both western European and south Asian Indians is a good example. It's a wildly complicated area where we have archaeological, linguistic, and now genetic evidence that can be difficult to tease out and then to make things even harder there are often political complications too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_Europe#Gene...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-Europeans

Brilliant, eye opening explanation. Thanks! Would the Hymalaian chain be considered a southern border with India, in the archeological sense?

Not an archaeologist, just someone who reads a bit, but yes. Any effectively impassable barrier to large scale travel would qualify. For most of the time modern humans have been extant that meant the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the Himalayas, and the Sahara desert to name a few really big ones. This is not to say that nobody ever crossed these barriers, they just didn't in any quantity. There are plenty of anomalous finds, like the apparently Solutrean tools found in North America that are dated 19,000 to 26,000 years ago[1]. One explanation is that it's just a coincidence, another is that a group of ancient Europeans (who by the way were probably not very related to modern Europeans) found their way to North America. My personal opinion is the most scientifically sound way to figure out these questions is genetic analysis of any skeletons that can be found in the area. However digging up American Indian grave sites for sequencing presents serious ethical considerations, to put it mildly.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/new-eviden...

From Wikipedia: A continent is one of several very large landmasses. Generally identified by convention rather than any strict criteria, up to seven regions are commonly regarded as continents.

Always thought a continent was a clearly defined.

There's also the issue of tectonic plates. The Eurasian plate is one, the Indian plate is another, and the Arabian plate is a third. So while all three might be part of Eurasia from the perspective of archaeology they're different geologically.

Plates with large land masses are the Eurasian, Australian, North American, South American, African, Arabian, Indian, and Antarctic. The Caribbean plate has part of central America and several large islands on it, the Pacific plate has a number of large islands like Hawaii (and part of New Zealand), the Cocos plate has the tip of Baja California, and IIRC the remaining plates have only small islands (Filipino, Juan de Fuca, Nazca, and Scotia plates).

So by a definition of "tectonic plate with large landmass" you'd get at least 8 continents.

Ironically though, Sri Lanka is separated from mainland Eurasia by water.

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