Hundreds of millions of years before the continents assumed their familiar shapes, a vast supercontinent called Gondwana held the Southern Hemisphere together — and in doing so, may have held the conditions for life itself. New research, drawing on rock formations, paleomagnetic records, and climate modeling, has confirmed that Gondwana was no theoretical abstraction but a real and enduring landmass whose geological presence reshaped oceans, atmospheres, and the very chemistry that early life required. In settling a long-standing scientific debate, this work invites a deeper question: how much