I’m thinking a lot about ethnicity these days, partly because of the 23 and Me test Magda I both took last year during the depressing depths of the pandemic. What better distraction than to start plucking at the genetic threads left behind by your ancestors? Both of our results turned up a couple of surprises. Magda is a very small part Japanese, which, if you know anything about the history of Poland, is odd. I came up with far more Norwegian ties than I’d thought possible, and zero Irish DNA, which is also weird. We know that my Grandmother’s parents were both Irish. Is there some family secret there, buried in a crumbling basement bassinet in Rochester, New York? Or is it just a hole in the database. Most of the rest of me is just “English” which to a left-leaning WASP like myself seems very dull and overlooks the fact that the history of The British Isles is anything but.
But.
What are we doing when we pull at these strings? Magda’s Japanese connection is a hint at the fact that none of this matters much if one isn’t interested in tribalism. “Europe” and “Europeans” are a loose knit tribe based on skin color and the teachings of a book and its sequel written two thousand years ago in “Asia.” The area we know as Europe is actually a relatively small part of the genetically and culturally interesting continent of Eurasia, and is connected to the rest of the continent in ways mainstream culture really hasn’t even begun to acknowledge. Because the myth of a culturally and genetically isolated Europe is a big part of European identity.
The ethnic region called Europe has gone great lengths to distance themselves from the rest of Eurasia, even going as far as to create a separate, fictitious, continent on which they claim to live. The classic “seven continents” are:
Europe
Asia
Africa
North America
South America
Antarctica
Australia
A glance at the map of the world will tell you that this is absurd. If geology can be classified as racist then this is an example of that. Europe is totally, completely, firmly connected to the Eurasian continent. There is no isthmus, no canal, no sea, that separates the two perceived areas. There are some low mountains, the Urals (which at their highest are lower than most of the Alps,) and the vanishingly narrow Bosporus Strait that used to separate Greece from Turkey, but that’s it (Istanbul actually straddles it.) One could walk from Krakow to Korea and take a quick boat ride to Japan if one had the will. Russia is often considered part of Europe, but spans the entire Eurasian continent. So is only some of Russia Europe? All of it? None of it?
Pointing out these obvious facts tends to irritate some people.
Europe has struggled for centuries to accommodate other people from the rest of the continent, but has never had much trouble with the concept of invading it. Two great examples of ethnic bands of people moving into Europe in the historical era are the Roma, long known in English as Gypsies, and the Jewish people. I say the “historical era” only because we have records of when these migrations occurred. We don’t have written records for when the Celts chased out the corded pot people, who had chased out someone else who had eradicated the Neanderthals.
Even though the Jewish people and the Roma have been living in Europe for a couple thousand years, ethnic Europeans have had a hell of a time accepting them as European. But this loose collection of European tribes, that itself has only become one tribe “The Europeans” in the context of globalization, was violently fractured among itself for thousands of years.
Extremely recently, in a meth-fueled ethno-rage, Nazi Germany decided that the Teutonic tribes were superior and started killing or subjugating other Europeans who they felt didn’t fit in. The result of this modern, mechanized, murderous tribalism was the slaughter of about six million European Jews and about six million other Europeans as well, including Roma and Slavs, ethnicities who the Nazis also deemed inferior. Despite living together for centuries, believing in the same God, using most of the same holy scripture, intermarrying, working together, even celebrating Christian holidays— the European Jews were still seen as being from another tribe and another, inferior, continent.
“Asia” is not only not a different continent, it is the cradle of Eastern and Western civilization. Much of the foundations of Western culture were laid in what is now Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and Egypt. Greece is grudgingly accepted as part of Europe based partly on geography and partly on their ‘Golden Age’ which is an era European culture draws heavily on for everything from architecture to philosophy. As noted, the Jewish people wrote (or at least compiled) the book that Christianity is based on. China has much more to do with European culture than we like to admit: moveable type changed everything, as did gunpowder and paper, silk and tea, all imported from China along routes that definitely do not cross any geographic barrier at all. Because again. All the same continent (waves hands around to encompass everything.) Sugarcane comes from New Guinea by way of India. Can you picture Western culture without sugar? Please. Pass me a popsicle.
So what we have here is a failure to properly define where geology ends and tribalism begins. Divisions based on who wrote what book and who has slightly elevated melanin levels and who finds it weird to drink the milk of other sentient creatures has popped up in the science of plate tectonics. Antarctica and Australia are no doubt continents because you have to get to each via open water, as well as being on their own distinct plates. The Americas are probably two continents, but that are physically connected at the isthmus of Panama. ‘The Old World’ did not distinguish between the native people of the two continents. They called the whole thing ‘America’ as we spoke to ad nauseam, in our book, The Edge of Knowing. But it also turns out that Eurasia is really, really close to North America. Siberians and Alaskans can practically wave at each other and seem to have been doing that and more for a long, long time.
Regarding Egypt, it’s in Africa right? Right! And wrong. It is in Africa and Eurasia since the Red Sea does not actually separate the two ‘continents’ and in fact is just a glorified pond that can be clogged up in an instant by one boat turning sideways. Hence, Africa may actually be part of Eurasia, so it all should probably be called Afroeurasia, One can, and one most certainly has, traipsed from Senegal to Siberia.
If saying Asia and Europe are on the same continent or that Africa might be part of the Eurasian landmass makes one slightly uncomfortable, it might be best to ask one’s self why that is. If the name Afroeurasia disturbs you, well, that I get. Let’s come up with a better name. Maybe let’s call the whole thing Africa, since, let’s be real; if 23 and Me went back far enough, it all started there anyway.
Fig. 1: This map is bullshit. Note how Africa is conveniently completely cleaved from “Asia” and how Europe just sort of… stops, at the otherwise unimpressive Ural Mountains which don’t even span that entire distance. (see: fig. 3)
Fig. 2: An argument can be made.
Fig. 3: You can see Eurasia from space. What you can’t see is a physical division between Europe and the rest of Asia.