Columbian Exchange: History of the Americas, Eurasia and Africa

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Columbian Exchange

About 200 million years ago there was one big continent called Pangaea. They believed that, this landmass began to separate. They believed that the Atlantic Ocean formed, dividing Africa and Eurasia from the Americas. Over the next several million years plants and animals changed and made to separate biological worlds. It wasn’t until Christopher Columbus and his crew sailed to the Americas in October 1492, they started interacting with each other.

Europeans brought diseases to the Americas, such as smallpox and measles. The original descendants did not bring the diseases because they traveled through the cold and they had no domesticated animals. Many of these diseases were caused by domesticated animals. At the time people that lived in Afro-Eurasia had developed immunities to these diseases. Native Americans did not have these immunities that’s why possibly 90% of the first Americans died between 1492 and 1650.

Old World crops such as wheat, barley, rice, and turnips had not traveled west across the Atlantic. Some of the New World crops that hav...

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