The Columbian Exchange ranks among my favorite historical topics I used to teach. I regard it as the most important event combining biology and history in the modern world. Only a handful of events in all of history can even compare in importance. Similar candidates include the industrial revolution, the major world religions, perhaps the invention of fire or writing.

What makes this ironic to me is that I’d never heard of the Columbian Exchange in detail until I got to graduate school and took an interest in environmental history. I had a BA in history and yet knew almost nothing about an event that completely reshaped every part of the world. So, I’m going to guess that most of my readers require an introduction to the Columbian Exchange, too.

What follows is a short introduction to what the Columbian Exchange is. The “Columbian” part refers to Christoforo Colombo (Christopher Columbus) and his voyages that brought the Eastern and Western hemispheres into sustained contact after 1492. Colombo, and the men who followed him, initiated the exchange of three broad classes of things between the Americas and the rest of the world. Those three things were plants, animals, and diseases.

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Setting Up the Columbian Exchange

To build on our introduction to the Columbian Exchange, we need to begin with some ancient history. One might call it pre-history, in fact.

This history begins with the first human migrations to the Americas. Pre-historians and archaeologist debate exactly when this happened. I’ll not enter that debate. Suffice it to say that by 15,000 or so years before the present, people had come to the Americas.

At the time, the world was in an ice age. Sea levels were lower than at present. This opened a land route from East Asia to Alaska, and prehistoric hunters followed large beasts across this “land bridge,” eventually arriving in North America. (The term “land bridge” possibly shortchanges a strip of land supposedly hundreds of miles wide.) They may also have used small boats. We’ll never know because any campsites these people made now lie under hundreds of feet of water because sea levels have gone back up.

Within a handful of centuries, people spread over the Americas. Then, however, the ice age ended, sea levels rose, and these first migrants, the indigenous people of the Americas, became isolated from the rest of humanity. This turned out to be crucial.

Domesticating Animals and the Columbian Exchange

In both the Americas and in Europe, Asia, and Africa, eventually people created civilizations. Humans started living together in settled communities roughly 5,000 to 6,000 years ago in some parts of the world. The process was later in other areas.

The domestication of animals became a signal event in human history. This had many consequences, one of which I’ll explore here. People living in Europe, Asia, and Africa had a number of large species of animals they domesticated. Those living in the Americas did not. This mattered.

Consequences

I’ll discuss animals and the Columbian Exchange in greater detail in a future post. For now, I’ll examine one consequence. The animals Europeans, Asians, and Africans lived alongside, over time and sustained contact, infected humans with several diseases when these diseases mutated into a form that could affect humans. Perhaps the most deadly example is smallpox.

These diseases decimated populations many times over the first time they appeared. The Black Plague in Europe or the Justinianic Plague in the 6th century Byzantine and Persian empires are notable examples. Many died. Some survived and developed immunity to these massive killers. Other diseases, while not epidemics like the plague, became endemic, killing people frequently but not in massive batches at once. Smallpox and malaria are examples of these.

People in the Americas, however, for a variety of reasons, had very few animals that they domesticated. The largest two, the llama and the alpaca, were not widespread throughout the Americas as, say, horses, and cattle were in Europe or Asia. As a result, people in the Americas suffered from fewer contagious diseases historically. This was great for them. Until 1492.

Please come back for my next post to read about the consequences of this exchange of diseases in 1492. Teaser: it could have resulted in the extinction of humanity.

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