question: Who decided where continents split up?
comment: The continental divides are kind of arbitrary and based on traditional designations based on incomplete information from ancient times. The Greeks and Romans distinguished the start of Asia at the [Bosporus]( URL_0 ) but didn't realize that landmass extended back to connect to eastern Europe. Russia is in both Europe and Asia because the Continents are intended to be geographical distinctions, not political distinctions, and the accepted dividing line between eastern Europe and western Asia is the [Ural mountains]( URL_1 ).
passages: Silver and gold from the viceroyalty of Peru were transported overland across the isthmus by Spanish Silver Train to Porto Bello, where Spanish treasure fleets shipped them to Seville and Cádiz from 1707. Lionel Wafer spent four years between 1680 and 1684 among the Cuna Indians. 
   Section::::Iconography.
   Section::::Views of Asia.
  
  Section::::Views of Asia.:The geographical or traditional view.
  
  Medieval Europeans considered Asia as a continent, a distinct landmass. The European concept of the three continents in the Old World goes back to classical antiquity. Definition of continents has long been and remains primarily the realm of geographers, including cultural geographers as well as physical geographers. A wide majority of geographers, via nearly all atlases and many other publications from the National Geographic to the CIA World Factbook and Merriam-Webster's Geographical Dictionary define Europe, Asia and Africa as continents.
  
  Section::::Views of Asia.:The geographical or traditional view.:The Hellenic origin.
   The first distinction between continents was made by ancient Greek mariners who gave the names Europe and Asia to the lands on either side of the waterways of the Aegean Sea, the Dardanelles strait, the Sea of Marmara, the Bosporus strait and the Black Sea. The names were first applied just to lands near the coast and only later extended to include the hinterlands. But the division was only carried through to the end of navigable waterways and "... beyond that point the Hellenic geographers never succeeded in laying their finger on any inland feature in the physical landscape that could offer any convincing line for partitioning an indivisible Eurasia ..."
   For Laurent's French readers, Asia ended at "our sea", the Mediterranean; Europeans were only dimly aware of the Ural Mountains, which divide Europe from Asia in the eyes of the modern geographer, and which represent the geological suture between two fragmentary continents, or cratons. Instead, the division between these continents in the European-centered picture was the Hellespont, which neatly separated Europe from Asia. From the European perspective, into the Age of Discovery, Asia began beyond the Hellespont with Asia Minor, where the Roman province of Asia had lain, and stretched away to what were initially unimaginably exotic and distant places— "the Orient".
   BULLET::::- The "Debatable and Debated" zone, located between the 40th and 30th parallels, characterized by a temperate climate; and,
  
  BULLET::::- A southern zone, located below the 30th parallel north, characterized by its hot climate, and dominated by sea power.
   Global regions distinguishable from space, and are therefore clearly distinguished by the two basic terrestrial environments, land and water. However, they have been generally recognised as such much earlier by terrestrial cartography because of their impact on human geography. They are divided into largest of land regions, known as continents, and the largest of water regions known as oceans. There are also significant regions that do not belong to either classification, such as archipelago regions that are littoral regions, or earthquake regions that are defined in geology.
  
  Section::::Globalization.:Continental regions.
   Before the discovery of the New World a commonplace of classical and medieval geography had been the "three parts" in which, from Mediterranean and European perspectives, the world was divided: Europe, Asia and Africa. As Laurent de Premierfait, the pre-eminent French translator of Latin literature in the early fifteenth century, informed his readers:
   Section::::Europe and Asia.:Modern definition.
   Section::::Europe and North America.
  
  Europe and North America are separated by the North Atlantic.
   Ancient Greek thinkers subsequently debated whether Africa (then called "Libya") should be considered part of Asia or a third part of the world. Division into three parts eventually came to predominate. From the Greek viewpoint, the Aegean Sea was the center of the world; Asia lay to the east, Europe to the north and west, and Africa to the south. The boundaries between the continents were not fixed. Early on, Europe–Asia boundary was taken to run from the Black Sea along the Rioni River (known then as the "Phasis") in Georgia. Later it was viewed as running from the Black Sea through Kerch Strait, the Sea of Azov and along the Don River (known then as the "Tanais") in Russia. The boundary between Asia and Africa was generally taken to be the Nile River. Herodotus in the 5th century BC, however, objected to the unity of Egypt being split into Asia and Africa ("Libya") and took the boundary to lie along the western border of Egypt, regarding Egypt as part of Asia. He also questioned the division into three of what is really a single landmass, a debate that continues nearly two and a half millennia later.
   as early as 1670 John Ogilby under the title "Africa" published ""an accurate Description of the Regions of Egypt, Barbary, Libya, and Billedulgerid, the Land of Negroes, Guinea, Æthiopia, and the Abyssines, with all the adjacent Islands, either in the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Southern, or Oriental Seas, belonging thereunto"".
   Throughout the Middle Ages and into the 18th century, the traditional division of the landmass of Eurasia into two continents, Europe and Asia, followed Ptolemy, with the boundary following the Turkish Straits, the Black Sea, the Kerch Strait, the Sea of Azov and the Don (known in antiquity as the Tanais). But maps produced during the 16th to 18th centuries tended to differ in how to continue the boundary beyond the Don bend at Kalach-na-Donu (where it is closest to the Volga, now joined with it by the Volga–Don Canal), into territory not described in any detail by the ancient geographers.
   As geographic knowledge of the Greeks increased during the Hellenistic period, this archaic convention was revised, and the boundary between Europe and Asia was now considered to be the Tanais (the modern Don River). This is the convention used by Roman era authors such as Posidonius, Strabo and Ptolemy.
   Section::::Europe and North America.:Islands.
  
  The geographical notion of a continent stands in opposition to islands and archipelagos.
  
  Nevertheless, there are some islands that are considered part of Europe in a political sense.
  
  This most notably includes the British Isles (part of the European continental shelf and during the Ice Age of the continent itself), besides the islands of the North Sea, the Baltic Sea and the Mediterranean which are part of the territory of a country situated on the European mainland, and usually also the island states of Iceland and Malta.
   The Prince Edward Islands are located between Africa and Antarctica, and are the territory of South Africa, an African country. The Australian Macquarie Island and the New Zealand Antipodes Islands, Auckland Islands, and Campbell Islands, are all located between the Oceanian countries of Australia and New Zealand and Antarctica.
  
  Australia's Heard Island and McDonald Islands and the French Kerguelen Islands are located on the Kerguelen Plateau, on the Antarctic continental plate. The French Crozet Islands, Île Amsterdam, Île Saint-Paul, and the Norwegian Bouvet Island are also located on the Antarctic continental plate, and are not often associated with other continents.
   The Portuguese Atlantic island possession of the Azores is from Europe and from Africa, and is usually grouped with Europe if grouped with any continent. By contrast, the Canary and Madeira islands (including the Desertas Islands and the Savage Islands) off the Atlantic coast of Morocco are much closer to, and usually grouped with, Africa (the Canary Islands are only from the African coast at their closest point, while Madeira is from Africa and from Europe).
   When sea levels were lower during the Pleistocene ice ages, greater areas of continental shelf were exposed as dry land, forming land bridges. At those times Australia–New Guinea was a single, continuous continent. Likewise, the Americas and Afro-Eurasia were joined by the Bering land bridge. Other islands such as Great Britain were joined to the mainlands of their continents. At that time there were just three discrete continents: Afro-Eurasia-America, Antarctica, and Australia-New Guinea.
  
  Section::::Definitions and application.:Number.
  
  There are several ways of distinguishing the continents:
   In terms of associating islands with either continent, the boundary is usually drawn between Greenland and Iceland. The Norwegian islands of Jan Mayen and Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean are usually associated with Europe. Iceland and the Azores are protrusions of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and are associated with and peopled from Europe, even though they have areas on the North American Plate. (Definitions of "continents" are a physical and cultural construct dating back centuries, long before the advent or even knowledge of plate tectonics; thus, defining a "continent" falls into the realm of physical and cultural geography, while continental plate definitions fall under plate tectonics in the realm of geology.)
   Eratosthenes, in the 3rd century BC, noted that some geographers divided the continents by rivers (the Nile and the Don), thus considering them "islands". Others divided the continents by isthmuses, calling the continents "peninsulas". These latter geographers set the border between Europe and Asia at the isthmus between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, and the border between Asia and Africa at the isthmus between the Red Sea and the mouth of Lake Bardawil on the Mediterranean Sea.
   Section::::History.
  
  Section::::History.:Early history.
  
  Abraham Ortelius , Theodor Christoph Lilienthal (1756), Alexander von Humboldt (1801 and 1845), Antonio Snider-Pellegrini , and others had noted earlier that the shapes of continents on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean (most notably, Africa and South America) seem to fit together. W. J. Kious described Ortelius' thoughts in this way:
   Boundaries between the continents of Earth
  
  The boundaries between the continents of Earth are generally a matter of geographical convention. Several slightly different conventions are in use. The number of continents is most commonly considered seven but may range as low as four when the Americas and Afro-Eurasia are each considered a single continent. According to the definition of a continent in the strict sense, an island cannot be part of any continent, but by convention and in practice most major islands are associated with a continent.
  
  There are three overland boundaries subject to definition:
   While "continent" was used on the one hand for relatively small areas of continuous land, on the other hand geographers again raised Herodotus's query about why a single large landmass should be divided into separate continents. In the mid-17th century, Peter Heylin wrote in his "Cosmographie" that "A Continent is a great quantity of Land, not separated by any Sea from the rest of the World, as the whole Continent of Europe, Asia, Africa." In 1727, Ephraim Chambers wrote in his "Cyclopædia," "The world is ordinarily divided into two grand continents: the old and the new." And in his 1752 atlas, Emanuel Bowen defined a continent as "a large space of dry land comprehending many countries all joined together, without any separation by water. Thus Europe, Asia, and Africa is one great continent, as America is another." However, the old idea of Europe, Asia and Africa as "parts" of the world ultimately persisted with these being regarded as separate continents.
   Historically in Greco-Roman geography, "Africa" meant Ancient Libya, and its eastern extent was taken to be around Marmarica, at the "Catabathmus Magnus", placing Egypt in Asia entirely.
   Further details about some of these are given below:
  