The idea that continents could move didn't come about until the Reinassance, mostly because the vast majority of the Earth was unknown to the Europeans during the Middle Ages. The shape of North and South America was what spurred interest in the idea of Pangaea. Abraham Ortelius is one of the first cartographers to have linked the shape of the continents with a primordial supercontinent in 1596; he claimed that the continents were at some point separated, though he believed it to have been caused by enormous earthquakes and floods.

It was not until the 19th century that the scientific community began to discuss the mechanics of continental drift. Antonio Snider-Pellegrini became a proponent of the theory after discovering identical plant fossils in both Africa and South America. Alfred Russel Wallace, a British naturalist and explorer, believed that the continents underwent constant transformations and changes, but this idea was not seriously considered by the scientific community until Alfred Wegener formulated his theory of continental drift, and the scientific community began to seriously consider the existence of an Urkontinent as Alfred Wegener called it - a primordial continent.