Which Animals Were Europeans Introduced To During The Columbian Exchange?

Two hundred one thousand thousand years agone, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, all seven continents were united in a unmarried massive supercontinent known as Pangaea. Later they slowly bankrupt apart and settled into the positions we know today, each continent adult independently from the others over millennia, including the evolution of dissimilar species of plants, animals and leaner.

By 1492, the year Christopher Columbus first made landfall on an isle in the Caribbean, the Americas had been most completely isolated from the Old Earth (including Europe, Asia and Africa) for some 12,000 years, e'er since the melting of body of water water ice in the Bering Strait erased the land route between Asia and the West coast of North America. But with Columbus' inflow—and the waves of European exploration, conquest and settlement that followed, the procedure of global separation would be firmly reversed, with consequences that nonetheless 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 betwixt 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 1,000 men to explore farther and expand 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 constitute in the Americas. (Horses had in fact originated in the Americas and spread to the Old World, only disappeared from their original homeland at some point after the land bridge disappeared, possibly due to disease or the arrival of man populations.)

The Europeans also brought seeds and establish cuttings to abound Old Globe crops such as wheat, barley, grapes and coffee in the fertile soil they institute in the Americas. Staples eaten by indigenous 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 Former World, revolutionizing the traditional diets in many countries.

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Disease Spreads Among Indigenous Populations

Along with the people, plants and animals of the Old World 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 "There was then much disease, death and misery, that innumerable fathers, mothers and children died … Of the multitudes on this island [Hispaniola] in the twelvemonth 1494, past 1506 it was thought there were just i tertiary of them left."

Smallpox arrived on Hispaniola past 1519 and soon spread to mainland Central America and across. Along with measles, influenza, chickenpox, bubonic plague, typhus, scarlet fever, pneumonia and malaria, smallpox spelled disaster for Native Americans, who lacked immunity to such diseases. Although the exact impact of Old Globe diseases on the Indigenous populations of the Americas is incommunicable to know, historians take estimated that betwixt eighty and 95 percent of them were decimated within the first 100-150 years after 1492.

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

Syphilis and the Columbian Exchange

Medical treatment of syphilis, 15th century.

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When information technology came to affliction, the exchange was rather lopsided—but at least 1 deadly disease appears to have made the trip from the Americas to Europe. The first known outbreak of venereal syphilis occurred in 1495, among the troops led by France's King Charles VIII in an invasion of Naples; it presently 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 often fatal.

According to one theory, the origins of syphilis in Europe can exist traced to Columbus and his crew, who were believed to take acquired Treponema pallidum, the bacteria that crusade syphilis, from natives of Hispaniola and carried it back to Europe, where some of them later joined Charles' regular army.

A competing theory argues that syphilis existed in the Quondam World earlier the late 15th century, but had been lumped in with leprosy or other diseases with similar symptoms. Because syphilis is a sexually transmitted illness, theories involving its origins are e'er controversial, but more contempo evidence—including a genetic link found between syphilis and a tropical disease known every bit yaws, institute 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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