How Did The Introduction Of Animals In The Columbian Exchange Affect Many Native American Cultures

Two hundred million years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the World, all seven continents were united in a single massive supercontinent known every bit Pangaea. Afterward they slowly broke autonomously and settled into the positions we know today, each continent adult independently from the others over millennia, including the evolution of unlike species of plants, animals and bacteria.

By 1492, the twelvemonth Christopher Columbus first made landfall on an island in the Caribbean, the Americas had been nigh completely isolated from the Old World (including Europe, Asia and Africa) for some 12,000 years, ever since the melting of sea ice in the Bering Strait erased the land road between Asia and the West coast of North America. But with Columbus' arrival—and the waves of European exploration, conquest and settlement that followed, the procedure of global separation would exist firmly reversed, with consequences that withal reverberate today.

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What Was the Columbian Substitution?

The landing of Christopher Columbus at San Salvador in the Bahamas, 1492.

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The historian Alfred Crosby first used the term "Columbian Exchange" in the 1970s to describe the massive interchange of people, animals, plants and diseases that took place between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres after Columbus' inflow in the Americas.

On Columbus' second voyage to the Caribbean in 1493, he brought 17 ships and more than i,000 men to explore farther and aggrandize an earlier settlement on the island of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic). In the holds of their ships were hundreds of domesticated animals including sheep, cows, goats, horses and pigs—none of which could be establish in the Americas. (Horses had in fact originated in the Americas and spread to the One-time World, but disappeared from their original homeland at some point later on the land bridge disappeared, perchance due to disease or the arrival of homo populations.)

The Europeans also brought seeds and institute cuttings to abound Sometime Globe crops such as wheat, barley, grapes and coffee in the fertile soil they found in the Americas. Staples eaten by ethnic people in America, such as maize (corn), potatoes and beans, as well as flavorful additions like tomatoes, cacao, chili peppers, peanuts, vanilla and pineapple, would soon flourish in Europe and spread throughout the Quondam Earth, revolutionizing the traditional diets in many countries.

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Affliction Spreads Among Indigenous Populations

Along with the people, plants and animals of the Old Earth came their diseases. The pigs aboard Columbus' ships in 1493 immediately spread swine flu, which sickened Columbus and other Europeans and proved deadly to the native Taino population on Hispaniola, who had no prior exposure to the virus. In a retrospective account written in 1542, Spanish historian Bartolomé de las Casas reported that "In that location was so much disease, death and misery, that innumerable fathers, mothers and children died … Of the multitudes on this island [Hispaniola] in the year 1494, by 1506 information technology was idea there were just one tertiary of them left."

Smallpox arrived on Hispaniola past 1519 and soon spread to mainland Central America and beyond. Forth with measles, influenza, chickenpox, bubonic plague, typhus, cherry-red fever, pneumonia and malaria, smallpox spelled disaster for Native Americans, who lacked immunity to such diseases. Although the verbal touch of Onetime World diseases on the Indigenous populations of the Americas is impossible to know, historians accept estimated that between lxxx and 95 percent of them were decimated inside the first 100-150 years after 1492.

The impact of disease on Native Americans, combined with the cultivation of lucrative greenbacks crops such as sugarcane, tobacco and cotton in the Americas for consign, would take some other devastating consequence. To meet the demand for labor, European settlers would turn to the slave merchandise, which resulted in the forced migration of some 12.5 1000000 Africans between the 16th and 19th centuries.

Syphilis and the Columbian Substitution

Medical handling of syphilis, 15th century.

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When information technology came to disease, the exchange was rather lopsided—merely at to the lowest degree one mortiferous illness appears to have fabricated the trip from the Americas to Europe. The first known outbreak of venereal syphilis occurred in 1495, among the troops led past France'due south King Charles VIII in an invasion of Naples; it soon spread across Europe. Syphilis is now treated effectively with penicillin, but in the late 15th-early 16th centuries, it caused symptoms such as genital ulcers, rashes, tumors, astringent pain and dementia, and was ofttimes fatal.

Co-ordinate to one theory, the origins of syphilis in Europe tin be traced to Columbus and his crew, who were believed to accept caused Treponema pallidum, the bacteria that cause syphilis, from natives of Hispaniola and carried it back to Europe, where some of them later joined Charles' army.

A competing theory argues that syphilis existed in the Old Globe before the late 15th century, but had been lumped in with leprosy or other diseases with similar symptoms. Because syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease, theories involving its origins are ever controversial, just more recent prove—including a genetic link found between syphilis and a tropical disease known as yaws, found in a remote region of Guyana—appears to support the Columbian theory.

Source: https://www.history.com/news/columbian-exchange-impact-diseases

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