BACKGROUND INFORMATION

The Columbia Exchange, more then just people.

About 180 million years ago the super continent of Pangaea broke apart. The Americas, Australia, Antarctica, and many of the world’s islands were flung into isolation. The Americas, more than 3,000 miles across the Atlantic, would be unknown to Homo sapiens for the first 15 to 20,000 years of their existence. With the coming of the second ice age, humans, perhaps following large game, set out across the then dry land of the Bering Sea to colonize the long isolated “new world.” Shortly after the first humans arrived, the land bridge of the Bering Strait flooded, leaving the newly arrived humans and their natural environment to evolve in almost complete isolation for some 13,500 years.

When Columbus unwittingly arrived in the long secluded “New World,” he brought much more than a few sailors and three ships. The long isolation of the earth’s two worlds, old and new, profoundly affected their interaction. The population of the Americas, about 50 million people before discovery, lived in a very different ecological balance than that of the Europeans. Domestication, in all forms, was very different in the Americas. From animals to crops to weeds to disease, the Americas were unique. The coming of the Europeans not only brought North and South America into the Old World economy, it also brought its ecology. Likewise, the ecology of the New World reciprocated. This mutual exchange, including among other things agricultural crops, domesticated animals, diseases, precious metals, technology, and humanity profoundly affected the history of the world. During the colonial era some 64,000 Native American’s died of Old World Diseases, American silver caused massive inflation throughout Europe, and the Apache cavalry wreaked havoc on the American west, today potatoes and manioc are staple crops in Africa, dandelions thrive on every continent but Antarctica, and seventy-two percent of the world’s wheat is produced outside its native land. This is the Columbia Exchange, more than human immigration; it is the wholesale transformation of the world’s ecological balance.