The Impact Of The Columbian Exchange

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Many years ago, continental drift took the Old and New Worlds apart, dividing North and South America from Eurasia and Africa. That disconnection lasted so long that it fostered divergent evolution; for example, the growth of rattlesnakes on one side of the Atlantic. Subsequently 1492, human travelers in part altered this propensity. Their reestablishment of relationships through the merge of Old and New World plants, creatures, and diseases, frequently known as the Columbian Exchange. It’s one of the most spectacular and significant ecological events of the past millennium.
Europeans first touched the shores of America, Old World crops such as wheat, barley, rice, and turnips had not moved west across the Atlantic, and New World crops such as maize, potatoes, and sweet potatoes had not traveled east to Europe. Americas, there were no livestock, all animals of Old World creation. Except for the llama, alpaca, dog, and guinea pig, the New World was not identical to the trained animals associated with the Old World, nor did it have the viruses associated with the Old World’s small populations of humans and such associated animals as chickens, cattle, black rats, and Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Among these germs were those that brought smallpox, measles, chickenpox, influenza, malaria, and yellow fever. The Columbian exchange of crops affected both the Old World and the New. Amerindian crops that have crossed oceans for example, maize to China and the white potato to Ireland has been incentive to population growth in the Old World. The latter’s crops and livestock have had much the same outcome in the Americas. The full story of the trade is very long, so for the hope of shortness and sharpness let us focus on a certain area, the east...

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...ian Exchange has been a crucial factor in that demographic explosion.
All of this had nothing to do with superiority or inferiority of biosystems in any absolute sense. It has to do with environmental differences. Amerindians were used to living in one specific kind of environment, Europeans and Africans in another. The Old World people went to America, the people brought with them their plants, animals, and germs, creating a kind of a habitat to which they were pretty much converted, and so they expanded in variety and quantity. Amerindians had not adjusted to European germs, and so initially their numbers descended. That decrease has altered in our time as Amerindian people have redefined to the Old World’s environmental influence, but the demographic victorious of the aggressors, which was the most amazing part of the Old World’s capture of the New, still stands.

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