what animals were brought to the old world
Two hundred million years agone, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, all vii continents were united in a single massive supercontinent known as Pangaea. After they slowly broke apart and settled into the positions nosotros know today, each continent developed independently from the others over millennia, including the development of different species of plants, animals and bacteria.
By 1492, the year Christopher Columbus first made landfall on an isle in the Caribbean, the Americas had been well-nigh completely isolated from the Erstwhile 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 route betwixt Asia and the West declension of N America. But with Columbus' arrival—and the waves of European exploration, conquest and settlement that followed, the procedure of global separation would be firmly reversed, with consequences that even so reverberate today.
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What Was the Columbian Substitution?
The landing of Christopher Columbus at San Salvador in the Bahama islands, 1492.
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The historian Alfred Crosby start 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' arrival in the Americas.
On Columbus' second voyage to the Caribbean in 1493, he brought 17 ships and more than 1,000 men to explore further and aggrandize an earlier settlement on the island of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Commonwealth). In the holds of their ships were hundreds of domesticated animals including sheep, cows, goats, horses and pigs—none of which could be found in the Americas. (Horses had in fact originated in the Americas and spread to the Former World, but disappeared from their original homeland at some betoken after the land bridge disappeared, possibly due to disease or the arrival of human populations.)
The Europeans too brought seeds and establish cuttings to abound Old World crops such as wheat, barley, grapes and java in the fertile soil they constitute in the Americas. Staples eaten by indigenous people in America, such as maize (corn), potatoes and beans, as well as flavorful additions similar tomatoes, cacao, chili peppers, peanuts, vanilla and pineapple, would soon flourish in Europe and spread throughout the Sometime Earth, revolutionizing the traditional diets in many countries.
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Affliction Spreads Amidst 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 mortiferous 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 "At that place 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 it was thought there were but one third of them left."
Smallpox arrived on Hispaniola by 1519 and soon spread to mainland Central America and beyond. Forth with measles, flu, chickenpox, bubonic plague, typhus, cherry fever, pneumonia and malaria, smallpox spelled disaster for Native Americans, who lacked immunity to such diseases. Although the exact affect of Old World diseases on the Ethnic populations of the Americas is impossible to know, historians have estimated that between 80 and 95 percent of them were decimated within the first 100-150 years after 1492.
The impact of disease on Native Americans, combined with the tillage of lucrative cash crops such as sugarcane, tobacco and cotton fiber in the Americas for consign, would take another devastating consequence. To meet the demand for labor, European settlers would turn to the slave trade, which resulted in the forced migration of some 12.5 one thousand thousand Africans between the 16th and 19th centuries.
Syphilis and the Columbian Substitution
Medical treatment of syphilis, 15th century.
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When it came to disease, the exchange was rather lopsided—only at least one mortiferous 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 soon spread beyond 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, severe pain and dementia, and was often fatal.
According to one theory, the origins of syphilis in Europe can be traced to Columbus and his crew, who were believed to take caused Treponema pallidum, the bacteria that cause syphilis, from natives of Hispaniola and carried information technology back to Europe, where some of them subsequently joined Charles' army.
A competing theory argues that syphilis existed in the Erstwhile World before the tardily 15th century, only 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, simply more recent evidence—including a genetic link constitute betwixt syphilis and a tropical disease known as yaws, plant 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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