It Is Necessary To Begin at the beginning in considering the Neo-Europes, and that means not in 1492 or 1788 but about 200 million years ago, when a series of geological events began that brought these lands to their present locations. Two hundred million years ago, when dinosaurs were still lolling about, all the continents were jammed together in one great supercontinent that the geologists call Pangaea. It stretched over scores of degrees of latitude, and so we can assume that it had some variations in climate; but with only one land mass, there would not have been much variety among its life forms. One continent meant one arena for competition, and so only one set of winners in the Darwinian struggle for survival and reproduction. Reptiles, including all the dinosaurs, were the dominant kinds of land animals in Pangaea – and, therefore, the world – for three times as long as mammals have held that position since, and yet reptiles diversified into only two-thirds as many orders.

About 180 million years ago Pangaea began to break up like some immense tabular iceberg rotting in the heat of the Gulf Stream. First it split into two supercontinents, and then into smaller units that became, in time, the continents we know. The process was more complicated than we can describe here (indeed, more complicated than geologists completely understand as yet), but, in broad terms, Pangaea broke up along lines of intense seismic activity that later became undersea ridges. The most thoroughly examined of these is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge that boils and bubbles from the Greenland Sea to Spiess Seamount, twenty degrees of latitude and twenty of longitude southwest of Cape Town, South Africa.