When examining Africa and South America, it's striking how well the continents seem to fit together, like two pieces of a puzzle. Today, the concept of Pangaea—a gigantic supercontinent that existed 200 million years ago—seems almost self-evident to us. However, this theory was first proposed relatively recently, in 1912, by Alfred Wegener.
Before Wegener introduced his theory of Continental Drift, the prevailing scientific belief was that continents were "fixed" to the ocean floor and never moved. Wegener used an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating biology, botany, and geology, to demonstrate that currently separated continents must have once been connected. He supported his argument with evidence such as fossils of the same species found on different continents and similar rock formations on opposite sides of the ocean.
Wegener's theory was criticized primarily because his explanation of how continents "moved," based on Earth's rotation, was unconvincing. While the scientific community was justified in their skepticism on this point, consensus around the existence of Pangaea eventually emerged after the advent of plate tectonics in the 1960s, which supplied the missing mechanism for continental movement.
We now know that land masses are in constant motion and that another supercontinent will likely form in another 250 million years, but our current understanding began with Wegener's ingenuity; he investigated something that, in hindsight, appears obvious but had eluded explanation until he dared to tackle it.
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