Are two Pangeas possible?

Question

As we know, the Earth had one super continent at one point in the history of our planet, which eventually broke apart to become what we have today.

Assuming we're talking about a planet near identical to Earth (size, density, distance from sun, similar atmosphere, similar geological processes, etc.), would it be possible for two super continents to have arisen early on (before life progressed into multi-cellular forms), and then stayed separate for 3-4 billion years? Is there some geological process or something else that would prevent this from happening, at least once in the galaxy?

Edits for clarification

I may have not been quite clear about my 'requirements', so a few clarifications.

1. When I said 'Pangea' I used it as the name we typically give to the super continent that once existed.

2. I understand that two such continents having existed at some point is entirely possible. My question is more along the lines of 'would it possible for not only those two to have existed at some point, but also to continue to exist for a long period of time such as 3-4 billion years without ever breaking apart or ever coming into contact with each other'.

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Edit 2

The reason for the question is, I want to have two intelligent creatures evolve on the two continents separately, and not come into contact with each other until they've evolved into intelligent and sea-faring animals.

Answer 1

On Earth, continental drift is caused by volcanic activity; so, are oceans. So without a lot more knowledge of what other worlds are actually like to maybe contridict that, a little bit of simple reasoning tells us that a planet with oceans should have significant continental drift over that time scale which makes 3-4 billion years of continental separation seem very unlikely. Furthermore, even with separate continents, you'll still probably have a enough major ice ages that would allow continental crossing via ice bridges many many times during that period.

That said, nature has your back on this one. As it turns out, it does not take super long continental separation to achieve what you are looking for. Thanks to a thing called convergent evolution, it is perfectly possible for two completely different species in different parts of the world to evolve the same characteristics given the same environmental niche and pressures. Considering how long it took humans to go from tree-swingers to computer engineers, your world only needs separate continents for about 1-2 million years to have smart lizards evolve on one land mass and smart mammals to evolve on the other without either competing for their niche until one learns to cross the Ocean.

The only thing you might need to adjust from Earth like is to make sure there are no major super volcanoes or asteroid impacts going off during that time period which might cause an ice age to bridge the gap.

Alternatively, without writing, civilizations don't exactly have the best memories of things that happened more than a few hundred years ago. It could be that your species did cross during an ice age, but they each successfully drove the other to extinction on their native continents after the ice age ended, then forgot about it.

Answer 2

Formation of super continents and their subsequent breakup is cyclical in nature.

Supercontinent Cycle

On geological time scales it would be reasonable to assume that there was a period in which there were only 2 major landmasses present on the planet.

Your timescale of 3-4 billion years is off by an order of magnitude of the Earth's, but it would be plausible that continents on other planets could move more slowly. Your planet must be much older than Earth, who's age is estimated to be about 4.5 billion years old.

Answer 3

We're pretty sure it's happened right here on a earth, a few times. Pangea didn't break up straight into seven continents, it was two big bits for a while both before it formed and after it broke up, and Pangea wasn't the first time all the continents had joined together either.

So, not only is there no process that prevents it from happening, it's pretty much guaranteed to happen at least once in the lifetime of any earthlike planet.

Answer 4

First thing first, Pangea means "all the earth", because it encompassed the whole of the emerged land back in those times.

So, from a logic point of view there can be no two Pangea.

From a geological point of view, if you look at the appearance of the present emerged lands, you might argue that we have less than 5 continents: Asia, Europe and Africa are a single continuous bunch of dryland, so it is entirely possible that only two continents existed or will exist at a given time.