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Over 25,000 years ago, Asian peoples started migrating to the Americas by land and sea. Major migrations occurred 12,000–14,000 years ago. Over time these peoples developed an astonishing array of cultures and societies, from small hunting-and-gathering bands to complex empires. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of the common era, extensive commercial and political networks existed among the Mississippians, the Aztecs, and the Incas, although only the latter two continued to thrive by the late 1400s.
In southern Europe, too, during the fifteenth century, economic, cultural, and political advances fueled interest in long-distance trade and exploration. Italy and Portugal led these efforts, and their complete control of trade routes across the Mediterranean and around Africa to Asia led Spain to look west in hopes of gaining access to China and the Indies. In doing so, the Spanish unexpectedly came into contact with the Americas.
When Spanish explorers happened upon Caribbean islands and the nearby mainland, they created contacts between European and American populations whose lives would be dramatically transformed in a matter of decades. While native residents of the Americas were sometimes eager to trade with the newcomers and to form alliances against their traditional enemies, they fought against those they considered invaders. Yet some of the most significant invaders — plants, pigs, and especially germs — were impossible to defend against. Even Europeans whose primary goal was conversion to Christianity brought diseases that devastated local populations, and plants and animals that transformed their landscape, diet, and traditional ways of life.
From the 1490s to the 1590s, the most dramatic and devastating changes for native peoples occurred in Mexico, the West Indies, Central America, and parts of South America. But events there also foreshadowed what would happen throughout the Americas. As Spanish conquistadors and European competitors explored, they carried sufficient germs, seeds, and animals to transform native societies even before Europeans established permanent settlements in North America. As American Indian populations died out in some regions and fended off conquest in others, the Spanish and Portuguese turned increasingly to the trade in enslaved Africans to provide the labor to produce enormously profitable items like sugar, coffee, and tobacco.