Middle Continent, Why We Need to Divide Asia into Two Continents of West Asia and East Asia

 

A while ago I watched a CGPGrey video on how many continents there are. It pointed out that some borders between continents are rather arbitrary, for example border between Europe and Asia runs in rather arbitrary place and separates what is essentially one same landmass into two arbitrary halves.

In the end CGPGrey suggested that we agree that Eurasia is one and same continent. However, that only makes sense if you look on geographically undifferentiated outline of the landmass. If you look at culture, life and links between people who inhabit it, it will not make any sense. Asia already big as it is and uniting it with Europe will make it even bigger, too big to make any geographic sense out of the whole thing. 

Culturally it makes no sense either. China is not like India, and neither of them has much in common with Scandinavia. If anything, India has more in common with Spain than with China, but we call Spain Europe and India and China Asia. China is very different from India and has very little interaction with it despite sharing a very large border. That to the extend warrant calling them different continents.

After thinking about it I came up with a rather meaningful criterion, that can help divide the world into more meaningful continents: use mountains and occasionally rivers as a divider. Just like seas and oceans, mountains make for a natural divider between both land and people that inhabit it. Mountains are too hard to pass, making meaningful interaction between people on different side of the mountain chains all but impossible. It works for the previous example between India and China, while sharing a long border nearly all of it goes along the very high Himalayas mountain chain, which explains such a great differences between Indians and Chinese. Mountains divide people a lot more than seas and even oceans.

If you look at geological map above, you can rather easily trace this mountain chain geological boundary all the way to the Arctic Ocean. If so, would it make for nice natural border between East and West Asia? It pretty much would. So, this is the new continental boundary I propose. We can call new continents West and East Asia, in the same manner of North and South America, or we can call West Asia middle continent instead.

You can see exact borders on the map above. I used red line to divide West Asia from East Asia. I mostly followed Himalayas along the tallest peaks. In the south I used Sittang River in Myanmar as a final line of separation. In the north I originally used Yenisei River as final divider but later reconsidered and instead carved a line between Yenisei and Lena basins as a boundary. The latter is more accurate topologically, but the former is easier to draw. 

Not only new borders will make sense culturally as West Asias are rather different from East Asians. They will make sense geographically and will allow us to make better sense out of wasteness of Asia. After all, if something is too big to understand, one should subdivide it into smaller more manageable parts. With this new division Asia is no longer large unmanageable landmass, but a much more structured entity. Central Asia west of mountains is more connected to Iran than to China, just looking at architecture in Uzbekistan clearly shows you that. Finally, West Siberian lowlands are very different from a plateau further east. In Russia these areas are internally divided into West and East Siberia.

Furthermore, we should also set boundary between East Asia and Australia/Oceania as Wallace Line. Flora, fauna and people east of the line is vastly different from those, west of it, having more in common with Pacific Islanders than with Asians. That will make Indonesia two continental country, just as previous change will make Russia tri continental country.

Caucasus gorge should be border between Europe and Asia. 

White there is a certain division between Indian subcontinent and the rest of West Asia, fundamentally Kyber Pass does connect it with the rest of West Asia and that pass was often used historically to move even large armies.

Instead of merging Europe and Asia into Orwellian Eurasia, that is too large to make meaningful sense, we should divide Asia into West Asia and East Asia along the redline I drew on the map above. That way we will get much more meaningful continents that will represent actual reality on the ground a lot better than current situation. Hopefully this new division will take hold in minds of the world.