East Fortress
The land mass that encompasses the continents of Europe , Asia and Africa as well as Oceania was referred to as the east fortress . They are differentiated from the West - the American double continent . Occasionally Oceania (i.e. Australia , Polynesia , Melanesia and Micronesia ) is viewed as a south fortress independent of the east fortress .
The continents of the east fortress are either merged with each other (like Eurasia ), connected by land bridges (like Africa and Eurasia on the Isthmus of Suez ) or only separated by narrow and shallow inlets (like e.g. the Torres Strait between Australia and New Guinea or the Strait of Malacca between Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula ).
East and West Festivals are closer to each other on the Bering Strait (about 85 km) than Australia and New Guinea are on the Torres Strait (about 185 km). The apparently large distance between east and west is based primarily on the common two-dimensional world map representations . Their projection is mostly divided on the Bering Strait, so that the Pacific is divided on the left and right edge of the map, while the central Atlantic as the seemingly dominant ocean divides the land masses. The terms east and west were still in use in geography in the middle of the 20th century , but are rarely used today.
On the east fortress, the spread of man happened much earlier than on the west fortress. Since during the cold periods existing land bridge between the two (the Bering Bridge ) in an uninhabitable area of the world was that West fortress was until about 15,000 years ago settled by humans .
literature
- Hans Mann (arr.): Africa, Asia, Australia: the eastern strongholds of our continents (excluding Europe); small world customer. Dümmler Verlag, Bonn 1971. 19th revised edition, 68 pages. ISBN 3-427-31119-8 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ East Fortress . In: Heinrich August Pierer , Julius Löbe (Hrsg.): Universal Lexicon of the Present and the Past . 4th edition. tape 12 . Altenburg 1861, p. 497 ( zeno.org ).