HOF Episode 20: The Columbian Exchange

How about we start the episode with a couple hypothetical questions? Take a moment to reflect on the cuisines of the world today. I want you to try and imagine if you can Italian food without tomatoes. No? Can you picture Russian and Polish style, East European fare or Ireland without potatoes? Oh, that's even harder. How about Thai Vietnamese or Indian food without chili peppers? Mexican food without pork, cheese or citrus? Swiss chocolate, anybody? European pastry without vanilla? Now I'm just being mean, right? Up until now though, 19 episodes of this podcast over two years, none of those ingredients and culture combinations existed. They were segregated by a vast, impassable ocean hidden from each other for most of human history. Until in 1492, a guy named Columbus trying to find a way to the other side of his world, accidentally stumbled upon a whole new one, reconnecting Eurasia and Africa with the Americas for the first time in thousands of years. The and all its food and cuisine would never be the same. This is the story of the Colombian exchange. I'm the Anthrochef and the last time that the old world was connected by land with the New World was more than 16,000 years ago. Actually pretty brief in geological terms. During the last ice age, when much of the earth's water was locked up in glaciers and ice caps and sea levels were lower, the shallow seabed of the barring straight between modern Russia and Alaska was drained and exposed, making a land bridge between the two continents of Asia and North America. A thousand miles wide at its greatest extent, a cold and windy tundra where few things could grow, nearly inhospitable and yet not uninhabited. It was a connection to two continents that had never been touched by humans. Many anthropologists today dispute the assumption that humans walked across this barring land bridge, nor do they believe that they would have tried to. Instead they proposed that those ancient humans had much more maritime cultures, spreading out around the world by following its coasts in boats, and that the migration into the Americas was no different. Humans likely rode their way across the waters of the barring straight, following the coasts and hopping between islands. Eventually some made it to the still glaciated, just barely starting to thought Americas. So if it was by boat, why bring up the land bridge at all? Well, it's still needed to be there in order for humans to make the journey, and it's what makes this a story about food. Recall from earlier episodes that "human migration" didn't look the way you might imagine it. It doesn't look like a few brave explorers setting out on epic journeys over the horizon. Humans actually moved at a rate of less than half a mile per year, as foragers ranging over wide territories, widely dispersed in moving with seasons and animal migrations, seeking optimal conditions for plants to gather and game to hunt. By simply following the food, pushing a little further when necessary to get that next meal, humans very slowly took over the entire world. And so it was crossing into the Americas. Even though the bearing land bridge was an arctic waste where no human could survive for very long, there were enough scraggly shrubs and brush and other hearty vegetation to support animals like woolly mammoths, ground sloths and stepbison, as well as sabertooth tigers which hunted them. Humans could eat all of these things, and from the coasts likely poked their way further and further into and along the bearing waste until completely unbeknownst to them, they had arrived on a new continent where no human or even hominid had ever set foot. Over the next few thousand years, humanity worked its way down the American coasts and waves, as the ice age and ice sheets gradually subsided. Once all that ice and cold was finally melted, it was a migration free for all. Humans plunged into unclaimed hunting grounds full of huge game with no experience or exposure to human predators. We crossed Panama into South America 12 and a half thousand years ago and had reached its southern tip just one millennium later. Well honed from their tens of thousands of years, migrating across Eurasia and dealing with other hominids the whole way, homo sapiens conquered the humanless other half of the world, two whole continents, in just a fraction of the time. Other animals too crossed between the hemispheres while they could. Most notably horses and camels both evolved in the Americas, somehow migrated across the land bridge into Eurasia where they would end up as critical components for old world civilization. Then, both when extinct in their continents of origin, gifts for the old world civilizations that the Americas missed out on. Then around 11,000 years ago the world was warmed even further, sea levels rose and the barring land bridge drowned beneath the waves. The eastern and western hemispheres were totally cut off from each other and would remain so for the next 16,000 years. Two different worlds evolving on their own. The earth's plants, animals, humans and their food were now on two divergent paths. The natural and cultural evolution of the two hemispheres and then what happened once the worlds got reconnected by Columbus are of course great interest to historians and anthropologists. As we'll see simultaneously one of the most interesting, most transformative and the most tragic periods of world history. You see the neolithic and then the agricultural revolution began in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago. In the next few millennium the old world invented the wheel, metalwork, writing and urban civilization. The heirs of these civilizations copied one another over the ages as innovations ricocheted back and forth between Europe, Asia and Africa stimulating technological progress. Native Americans who had crossed to Alaska long before any of this happened missed out on all the benefits. They had to do everything on their own. And yet remarkably they succeeded. Not the same candidates for domestic animals and with their high calorie grain crop of corn being much more challenging to domesticate than old world cereals. The Americas reached their agricultural and technological developments later than Europe and Asia. The neolithic occurred later than that of the Middle East possibly because Indians needed more time to build up requisite population density. Out beasts of burden they couldn't capitalize on the wheel and they never developed steel. But in farming, Indians pretty much kicked Eurasia's butt back to the Stone Age. Even the poorest of Indians ate a larger, more nutritious and varied diet than Europeans. Thanks especially to the agricultural, miracle trifecta of corn, beans and squash. So every tomato in Italy, every potato in Ireland, every hot pepper in Thailand came from the Americas. Worldwide, more than half the crops grown today were initially developed there. In many ways indigenous American societies were superior. More highly evolved might even say, cleaner, better fed and maybe happier. But it wasn't just the weapons and the technology and the food. European life was well in ocean apart from the Americas. When Columbus crossed over in the descendants of the two great origin points of world civilization collided, it was not to be a smooth cultural exchange. And that's obviously the understatement of all time. All on pack all the reasons why of course, but first we've got some historical legwork to do in both hemispheres to get there. We've talked pretty extensively before about the civilizations of Mesoamerica, the Olmex Mayans and later Aztecs as well as South America, its coasts and Andy's Mountains, the Norte Chico culture and its millennia of descendants leading up to the Inca, for more on all of those societies, revisit episodes 3, 5 and 10. Today though, I want to try and round out our picture of what the Americas looked like before a European contact, by exploring the Amazon rainforest and the sprawling rest of North America. Many make the mistake of thinking of these landscapes as vast wilderness, untamed by civilization, but that's just not an accurate way to imagine it. Consider the very first accounts of Europeans, who skirted the coast of New England and described it as "everywhere, densely populated." The air was smoky from countless Indian bonfires, which could be smelled from hundreds of miles away. And that's just New England, the very edge of a huge continent, full of diverse, capable, more settled and technological than most imagine, peoples. Both of the American continents were practically endless in their diverse range of different lifestyles, eating habits, religious and social orders, and survival strategies, calling all of these people together, Indians, Native Americans, or anything at all really, isn't fair. It'd be like naming everyone in the Old World, Eurasians, and just leaving it at that, with no further distinction. But just like for all those Eurasians of the Old World, there are a few things which do seem to transcend and cross cultures. Almost everybody, from the southern tip of Chile, up to the Canadian sub-Arctic coast is eating maize or corn, as some part of their diet, along with its follower crops of beans and squash. The other big-binding trade of America is how creatively all its peoples used fire. Fire is by far the biggest shaper of landscapes in the world. It helps plants that need sunlight by clearing away overgrowth. Herbivores can get to the new generation of plants and move in, and then so do their predators. Fire at this controls the ecological landscape from top to bottom. In all of this planet's history, fire has had just two main sources. First and by far oldest, lightning, which for eons, even before life was even around, has struck the Earth, ignited wildfires, and reset landscapes. Nature's bulldozer and wrecking ball, making way for its reconstruction grew we call natural selection. Only incredibly recently, in the last 0.1 ish percent of Earth's lifespan, has another source of fire emerged. Hominids, and now just homo sapiens, who from early in our history discovered the benefits of burning and thus shaping landscapes. And nobody was better at using fire for those purposes than the peoples of the Americas. It's funny, people still imagine American Indians to be these tree-hugging hippy types, but they regularly burned continental-sized landscapes without hesitation. Suspension was of course the main purpose of all the smoke and flame. Large burns made way for forageable crops, but even more importantly facilitated hunting. Deer in the northeast, buffalo in the prairies, rabbits and insects on the west coasts, mousse in Alaska, even alligators in the Everglades, all were pursued with fire. Typically, a big ring of flame would be ignited using fallen leaves, driving animals to its center where there could be slaughtered with arrows. Fire even helped generate more prey for humans to hunt. The Americas never domesticated animals for me to like people in the old world. Instead, they retooled landscapes to encourage huntable game. In a way, you could call it animal agriculture instead of animal husbandry. Indians cultivated bumper crops of wild elk, deer and bears and other things, having learned to do what nature does sometimes on its own, burning away under and overgrowth to increase the number of herbivores, the predators who eat them and thus the people who eat them both. Bison is a striking example which had previously been only native to the western prairies, but had been driven east into habitats all the way to the New England coasts. They were imported along a path of fire, as Americans transformed enough forests where bison couldn't live, into open plains and fallows, extending the habitat across the entire continent and swelling the overall bison population numbers into something like that of a domestic animal. It was human fire which made the great plains and sweeping Midwestern prairies. Even with no domestic animals to speak of, the entire middle of the continent had been transformed into one giant game farm for wild animals to roam and be hunted. The great burning also cleared the way for a foragers paradise. Most of North America didn't dive into urbanized agriculture the way they did in Mesoamerica. Growing crops was a supplementary source of food at least at first, as people continued to rely on the natural world already shaped to their benefit. Why start a farm when you can simply walk a few miles away and hunt and forage everything you could ever need? People observed what nature already did and enhanced it, favoring conditions that suited humans more. The Americas were thus not a wilderness at all, but rather one giant pasture for humans to get food. In a way, the idea of indigenous peoples being knowledgeable about and in harmony with nature isn't totally wrong. Clearly there was a deep understanding of how the world works, but people were not just frallicking through woods and meadows and living off the land. They made those woods and meadows and were their masters. As Charles Mann puts in his book 1491, people were living in balance with nature, but they had their thumbs on the scale, shaped for their comfort and convenience, the American landscape had come to fit their lives like comfortable clothing, in a highly successful and stable system. If stable is the right word for a routinely blanketing miles of countryside in smoke and ash. The reason that this blows my mind is because it's like a whole other path that human society, technology and civilization could and did take. The separation of the hemispheres allowed an alternate timeline of humans "inventing agriculture." Without old world examples to follow, Americans made their own sustainable system of food production, using the way nature works already rather than fighting against it. In every way, as in genius, if not more so than the animal husbandry and field farming of ancient Europe and the near east. Both the old world and the new persisted by cleverly exploiting their environments. They just went about it in very different ways. Europeans broke land into individual fragments for farmers and herders, but Indians were not bound by offenses and divisions. They worked on a scale the size of which can be difficult to grasp. Oh, they made small plots too, for instance the one and a half million acres of terraces that still exist in the Peruvian Andes, but more so they shaped entire landscapes of continents to their purposes. When you look at the big picture, the Indians actually changed the Americas more than invading Europeans would, at least for several hundred years more. Who were these geniuses who figured all this out? Well, there are way too many peoples and cultures and stories patchworked across the continents for one episode, but let me see if I can put together a little historical highlight reel of some of the food and cooking and civilization going on in the Americas. Let's start by talking about the tens of thousands of mountains that archaeologists have uncovered across the United States. These hills of earth are mainly based around the Mississippi River and the rivers that flow into it, from Canada and the Great Plains, all the way over to the Atlantic coast and down to the Gulf of Mexico. These earthworks were everywhere and made by simply piling dirt up, basket by basket. They vary in age and size and have perplexed historians for decades. Some of them are just oddly symmetrical looking hills, others like small mountains, but in addition to these mountains, these builders made other shapes too. Birds, lizards, bears, gators, and snakes all made out of dirt. Though the zenith of the mound builders comes around 100 AD, there are early examples of some built 5 and a half thousand years ago, meaning that this culture is very old. Why did people build all these mounds? Archaeologists are still hard pressed to find a practical reason, and thus it seems that their purpose may have been simply the construction itself, which if you'll recall from earlier discussions on the origins of urban civilization in the Old World, mean that there's likely a direct connection between the construction of these giant earthworks and the spread of agriculture that went with them. Building a mound or a whole ring of mounds, using only people carrying baskets of dirt, is a long term enterprise, and all those people need to eat over that time. Though mound construction first began long before farming was big, it's possible that as the process got more complex and involved, so too to the logistics of feeding everybody involved, leading to levels of planning, which began more concentrated, more urban societies. During the earliest days of mound building, foraging and burn pasturing were still predominant, but maize farming was starting to catch on, and getting more popular all the time. The problem was that people had not yet developed a strain that had big enough seeds to be appealing, and more importantly, could tolerate the colder weather of more northern North America. People were working on that, and though it was ignored by many for a long time, maize was slowly but surely gaining popularity. The practice of building earthworks had fits and starts over the thousands of years, with long gaps in the record, but things really start to get interesting, right around when our calendars switch from BC to AD, when what's called the Hopewell culture started getting popular. Originating out of southern Ohio, its influence would spread across two-thirds of the modern United States. Hopewell sites in the Midwest have shells from the Atlantic Ocean, and obsidian from Yellowstone. In return, the Hopewell exported their culture and aesthetic, outwards in all directions. Soon, Hopewell style artifacts and artworks started appearing all over the continent, especially concentrated in the east. Interestingly, despite this rapid cultural spread, there's no evidence for much warfare at this time. Likely, the Hopewell achieved their cultural dominance by founding a popular religion, based around a stratified priesthood and social order, and tobacco-induced trances where shamans probably told everyone what the gods wanted, which was Mounds built. Mounds were thus like churches, probably sacred gathering spaces for communities. Hard to say if most of the eastern USA converted willingly or under pressure, but either way, Hopewell religion and thus culture was highly influential, culminating in the rise of Cahokia from 950 to 1250 AD. Cahokia was part of the Mississippi cultures, not Hopewell exactly, but descended from it, and using the same trade network. Coinciding with the rise of Maze Agriculture, its centerpiece was a four-level earth and mound, bigger than the great pyramid of Giza. You can still walk on it today in Missouri. I made mound construction sound simple before, like they were just half-azardly piling up dirt. But at the scale of Cahokia, you have to have a real engineering project on your hands, with materials and how they're layered, carefully selected to ensure success. Around the main mound, called Monksmound today, there were more than 100 smaller mounds, all surrounded by a network of canals and irrigated farmlands, fields of corn and hundreds of wooden homes. This city, Proto-city, whatever your source decides to call it, was a busy port, at the confluence of the Missouri, Illinois, and Mississippi rivers, with canoe trading networks stretching out far across the continent. Cahokia itself covered five square miles, and supported at least 15,000 people, making it the biggest urban concentration north of Mesoamerica, until the 18th century. The reason no one agrees if Cahokia is or isn't a city is because, well, it is and it isn't. Cahokia was a statistical outlier when you compare it to other ancient type city things. The only settlement of its kind for thousands of miles around. It had no examples to follow, and thus had a lot of weird features for a city. It didn't provide any goods or services for its surrounding countryside. It was just a massive collection of farmers packed close together in one place, with few specialized workers and crafts, people, or merchants. They had to invent every aspect of urban life for themselves, and after they're declined, their like was never really seen again. Before Cahokia's rise, there had been a bit of an overpopulation problem, and people were slowly hunting local deer and bison to near extinction. Indian food supplies were threatened. The rise of Maze Agriculture was the solution, and is tangled with the rise of Cahokia. The lowlands around this proto city were one of the best places around to grow it, but Maze would also be Cahokia's downfall one day. Because it was the first time that Indians north of the Rio Grande had tried to feed and shelter 15,000 people in one place, they made beginner mistakes. They cleared too many trees and leveled forests for miles, causing erosion and outstripping their own water supply, accidentally changing river courses to devastating effects. Later Indians learned from Cahokia's mistakes and fixed them. They saw the usefulness of Maze Agriculture, but reworked their landscape to better sustain it. They developed their own brand of successful farming. This was when you saw the broad shift from burning to solely create grazing fields, to doing large burns to replant large belts of woodland, forests of fruit trees, or giant orchards, full of spacious groves, wide enough to not only plant gardens in between in little corn fields, but a cornucopia of acorns, butternuts, hazelnuts, pecans, walnuts, and most ubiquitously chestnuts. American chestnuts, supposedly very sweet, are now extinct from blight, but once made up one in four trees in the entire eastern United States. But Hickory was another favorite. The cultural descendants of the Mississippians stored hundreds of bushels at a time, pounding them into pieces, and then boiling into very coarse flour, straining to preserve a thick, oily milk-type substance, that European visitors called as "sweet and rich as fresh cream." Indians used this Hickory milk in most of their cooking, including porridges and cakes made from corn. Within a few centuries, a large transformation had taken place. The whole eastern US was no longer just a giant game park, but a continental patchwork of corn fields and orchards the size of forests. Some lands were left for hunting, of course, but agroforestry was increasingly predominant. The transition from foraging to farming was so successful in this manner, with a smooth running perfectly built landscape functioning naturally, that Europeans who encountered it later had no idea it was artificial. No scars in the landscape, this was permaculture at its finest. A giant "you pick orchard," full of enough bounty to support an entire continent. This still doesn't mean that everyone lived in the exact same way. By the end of the first millennium AD, agriculture was spreading rapidly, and the region was becoming quite the patchwork of communities, each with its own preferred terrain, exact way of subsistence, and cultural style. While many communities of hunter-gatherers were still scattered around, most had adopted agriculture, at least as a secondary source of food. Though farming was still secondary overall, compared to the wild produce cultivated by humans into the land. Eventually, the eastern coast of the US became so densely packed with farmers that you can call it urban sprawl. Large villages, with each house surrounded by fields of corn, beans and squash, clustered into hamlets and towns which bumped up against each other all along the coast. Each community had its own mix of farming, foraging, and fishing. How much they stayed in one place versus might migrate somewhere seasonally. Living in easily disassembled and customized huts, which were better insulated than European houses at the time. These communities were still often semi-nomadic, with people usually moving once a year as the seasons changed. And thus, these societies were constantly in flux. As close together, other times dispersed, you could never quite nail them down, despite their permanent nature. Donlanders, as they were called, averaged 2,500 calories a day, far better than the norm in famine plagued Europe. A typical meal in this foodtopia might include big pots of corn and bean mash stew, with variations on meat, veggies, or dried fish cooked into it. There was also this dried powder of crushed corn, which, though menta's a more meagre-style travel food, was still sweet, hearty, and satisfying. Interestingly, European colonists recognized right away how nourishing and healthy Indian food was, but they did also be moaned as lack of salt. I guess on that judgment, I'd fall squarely in the Old World camp. Sorry, chefs need their salt. Jump far to the south with me now. And we see more profound shaping and cultivation of vast natural landscapes in South America. And there were a few things on this planet more vast than the Amazon rainforest. If you're anything like me, you probably imagine the Amazon as one of the last great vestiges of wilderness on this planet, in immense display of nature and the power of Mother Earth. We saw a lot of this in the coverage this year of the larger than normal forest fires, which affected this massive 2.5 million square mile region. But what if I told you that it was entirely man-made? There even more extreme example of indigenous agroforestry. You see, the Amazon ground has very poor soil for agriculture, but has a diverse cornucopia of fruit, nut, palm, and other edible type trees. Planting orchards of these trees, the first Amazonians transformed large swats of the land, then more open river basin into something that better suited their lifestyles, completely changing the assortment and the density of species across the region. So what seems like this dense, wild, primeval forest has in fact been managed by human beings for thousands of years. It's a built environment. Only trouble is, for the longest time anthropologists had no idea how the Amazonians could have done this. Again, the natural earth of the Amazon basin is almost infertile, unsuitable for trees let alone a forest or an agroforest. So what was the solution? Oh, just a little landscaping. But literally, they actually created the ground beneath their feet, shaping an entirely new man-made type of supersoil, called terra-pritta, which literally just means black earth. Rich, fertile, artificial, often called Indian black earth, currently only found on any wide scale in the Amazon basin. Covering at least 10% of the Amazon today, this black earth is truly almost magical. Natural rains don't lead to nutrients from its fields. Instead, this man-made soil fights back. Over time, it generates microorganisms that resist depletion. Dark earth can literally regenerate itself, perpetuating without much human help even after it gets going. It's really more of a hive superorganism than it is in a nerd material like you'd call soil. It's almost like making a sourdough bread. Amazonians inoculated bad soil with transformative bacterial change. Not everybody in Amazonia did this, but quite a few did, and did so deliberately with huge success over generations. The key to terra-pritta success is what the human Amazonians worked into it. Mountains and broken pottery, compost and manure, waste from turtles, fish and animals, but the real secret? Amazonians didn't exactly slash and burn their environment. Instead, they slashed and charred. Instead of completely burning forest matter to ash, they burned it incompletely to make charcoal. They then stirred that charcoal into the soil. You see organic matter sticks to charcoal, rather than eroding or being washed away by rains. Over time, charcoal oxidizes, which keeps providing nutrients to bind to yet more charcoal. In addition to the benefits to the soil, slash and char releases much less carbon into the air. Instead, putting it back into the earth where it can be put to good use. These nutrients can remain for 50,000 years as long as the charcoal is replenished. Nobody in Europe or Asia ever figured out the properties or benefits that it can bring to soil, only in Amazonia. Many Amazonians today still make terra-pritta this way. They make low biomass fires cool enough to walk through, made of weeds, cooking waste, crop debris, palm fronds, termite mounds, you name it. Burning is constant, part of daily life and the landscape always smoldering. Terra-pritta has 100 times more bacteria than normal adjacent soils, and more plants available phosphorus, calcium sulfur and nitrogen, than is naturally available in the rainforest. It also has much more organic matter, better retains moisture and nutrients, and is not rapidly exhausted by agriculture. In other words, it allowed Amazonians to farm where they couldn't farm before, and thus build forests, villages and societies. Taking all of this evidence together, also the domestication of corn, which we marvel at in older episodes, it seems clear that the American Indians, both North and South, had an understanding of cultivation and agriculture, meshed with the natural world that just wasn't matched in Europe and the Old World. Whose monocrop, vulnerable field systems seem brutish and primitive by comparison, even by the time of contact. It may be a cliche and also misleading without the whole picture, but the Indians across both American continents seem to have a deep understanding of the Earth, and how to best utilize it for themselves. Zooming back out, you're struck with just how special what was going on here was. I have to quote Charles Mann once again to really put it in perspective. Faced with ecological problems, the Indians fixed them. They were in the process of terraforming, two continents, when Columbus showed up and ruined everything. Speaking of, we're going to come back to this unique ecological situation, and thus the tragedy of what happened to it. But first, I think we need to change course for just a bit, find a good wind back across the Atlantic to catch up with our old friends in Europe and Asia. What was going on back in the Old World to cause them to send ships out into the blue and initiate the reconnection and great exchange between the hemispheres? It was the age of exploration, or the age of discovery you might say. Did the Spanish and the Portuguese wake up one day with an epiphany that they should learn how to navigate ocean winds and currents, build better vessels and explore the globe? Of course not. For most of history, there were serious limitations and gaps in seafaring knowledge that prevented ships and navies from venturing far out of sight from the coast, and of course out from the well-known center of the world, the Mediterranean Sea. The main obstacle to sailing the oceans was actually freshwater. Galleys and ancient times had sails, but were much more dependent on rowers, who of course depend on food and a lot of water to survive and burn the massive amount of calories required to row a ship over the sea. Water is heavy, and you can't carry a lot of it on a boat without sinking it. So the very nature of road seafaring prevented very long voyages for lack of a necessary water supply. But over the centuries before the age of exploration, humans had been chipping progress away, getting better at sailing, working smarter and not harder, getting out further and further from known waters. since the rise of Islam and even before, Arab and Indian seafarers had used the regular patterns of the monsoon winds to grow trade routes in and around the Indian Ocean. And during the relatively warm centuries of the early Middle Ages, the Vikings, of course, explored and settled Iceland, Greenland, and eventually Newfoundland, island hopping all the way to North America before turning back home. But when a colder climate returned after 1200, the northern settlements in Greenland and the settlement in Newfoundland were abandoned. Additionally, a bit further along in the medieval period, a few southern Europeans and Africans attempted to explore the Atlantic Ocean in the 13th and 14th centuries. Voyages from Genoa in 1291 and from Mali in the 1300s set out into the Atlantic, but did not return. Genoese and Portuguese explorers later discovered and settled the Maderas, the Azores, and the Canary Islands in the 14th century. These Atlantic Islands, hundreds of miles off the far western coasts of the Old World, were important stepping stones in figuring out how to sail on the ocean, and they would one day be critical jumping off points for Atlantic voyages to the New World. Firing voyages into the blue were also happening far to the east. In the Chinese Ming Dynasty, who we haven't covered yet, a series of voyages were sponsored with massive fleets of ships in the early 1400s. This was known as China's Treasure Fleet. The treasure ships carried out trade and luxury goods, including silk and precious metals, as well as stimulating diplomatic relations with various African and Asian states along the Indian Ocean. The Ming voyages around the southwest Pacific and then into the Indian and southern ocean were carried out on a grand scale, and may have been an inspiration to later western explorers. But yes, it was eventually the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal on the Iberian Peninsula, who would really change things. And why? And how? Until now, Iberia had been a bit of a backwater, rich in many resources to be sure, particularly silver and olives, but still the western edge of the known world. If you told someone in 1400 or before that Iberians would be the instigators of global, earth-shaking, cataclysmic change, they probably would have laughed at you. Iberia had been under Muslim control for much of the Middle Ages, and in fact the Spanish and Portuguese effort to become great seafarers and explorers had everything to do with their struggles against the thriving caliphates of Islam. Here is yet one more piece of evidence for our hopelessly Eurocentric view of history. Most of us in the west imagine the so-called Age of Exploration as a European phenomenon only, driven by the European Renaissance and change in mindset. The reality was that there was a global community totally independent of Europe. We already mentioned China's little known treasure fleet, but it's the Muslims who get the really short end in how much historical credit they get, especially in this early modern period. I think this is largely because the Ottomans did not focus on Atlantic exploration, and instead focused on maintaining, expanding their influence and defending the Indian Ocean and its massive trade network. At the time, to everybody in the old world, this was the right way to go. The Indian Ocean seemed like a way more lucrative venture than exploring a probably impassable ocean, or colonizing a new continent whose economic viability was completely unknown at the time. The Europeans would eventually strike gold and get super rich as a result of the new world, but at the time there was no way that anyone could have foreseen this. Yes, choosing the smarter ocean to invest in, the Ottoman Turks employed a combination of military might, intelligence, espionage diplomacy, propaganda, science, technology, and cartography to form an empire of soft power, where trade, rather than political or military strength, was the real secret sauce. The name of the Ottoman Sultan was right out loud on shipping docks from Arabia to India and China, and made a lot of money in the process. And their navies were well matched with the Spanish and Portuguese, even during the height of the age of sale. Challenging the Eurocentric narrative that European success and exploration and colonization and eventual domination of the world was boosted by superior technology and weaponry. Let's be brutally honest here. The Europeans got lucky. Being forced to go west rather than challenge the powerful Ottoman grip already on the seas and oceans of the east. The Spanish and the Portuguese and eventually British Dutch and French that followed had no choice but to take the riskier venture to the west across the Atlantic. The Ottomans already controlled the east and blocked their way. This is all compelling evidence for a new narrative of this era, in which Europe's eventual ascendancy was not a foregone conclusion. Back in Spain and Portugal, it took centuries, but Christian kings and nobles eventually drove the Muslims out of Iberia back to Africa, reclaiming the peninsula for Europe. This was called the Ricanquista. Iberian Ricanquista doors then took their success beyond the Straits of Gibraltar and captured a couple Muslim cities in present-day Morocco. Now the Portuguese controlled the entrance between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean and got their first taste of the wealth and power that came from being masters of critical choke points on the sea. In the early 1400s, they beefed up their maritime fleets in order to continue to take more of the fight to the Muslims in Africa and Asia. So Europeans taking to the seas was very much driven by fear of Muslim invasion and dominance. It was controlled the seas or be controlled. There was also a profit motive involved, a desire to find a direct route to India and East Asia for wealth and trade, a way to circumvent all the Muslim controlled territories in the way on the Land Route. If European kingdoms could find another route by sea, they'd be richer and a step ahead of their Muslim rivals. At the time there were two theories as to how they might accomplish this. First up, sail around Africa into the Indian Ocean and the other side of the world, around the Baktore if you will. The other theory was that maybe you could theoretically sail west across the vast Atlantic Ocean, but there was near universal agreement that this would be impossible to accomplish. That ocean was too large, and indeed if there weren't too continents in the way, European vessels at the time probably would not be able to make such a long voyage to Asia. So despite its own problems, the Portuguese focused on the Africa option. Their leader was a man named Prince Henry, who had led the capture of the Muslim cities in North Africa. Well aware of his geopolitical problems, Henry, later known as Henry the Navigator, funded out of his own pocket a research and navigation institute, where European sailing experts studied and improved navigational instruments, including the compass and the astrolabe. They also designed a new vessel, the caravale, whose small and shallow size and combination of square and triangular sails, and of course cannons, made it well suited for exploring and defending against pirates and Muslim rival fleets. Portuguese explorers in pushing further and further down the African coast, and then looping out into the open ocean to catch winds back to the Canary or as or islands, and then back to Europe, began figuring out how the prevailing western winds, as well as other oceanic wind and current patterns worked. It took generations, but the Portuguese soon learned how to use alternating bands of planetary winds and powerful ocean currents to carry them wherever they wanted to go. It was around 1470, as all these technologies and voyages started producing real returns, but the process of exploration really picked up speed. Portuguese ascendants on the seas culminated in the voyage of Vasco de Gama, around the tip of Africa, all the way across the Indian Ocean to Calcutta, India, making significant inroads into Muslim trading territory. Eventually, they figured out how to sail further to the south and catch massive winds around the Indian Southern Oceans to the far east, avoiding Ottoman controlled waters. entirely. By 1520, the Portuguese had almost forgotten about sailing west across the Atlantic, income from their spice trade across the Indian Ocean provided nearly 40% of total revenue. Copying and leaching off the Ottoman model, Portugal had created a kind of empire made powerful and wealthy not through possession of large areas of territory, but by the strategic control of sprawling, oceanic trade routes on the other side of the world, an empire of water. Where the Portuguese had led the way, the Dutch British and French would later follow. The rivalry between these European marine trading powers would go on to trigger colonial wars around the world as each attempted to eject each other from strategic ports and islands, forts and control checkpoints to dominate the critical sea passages and control trade. But all of that's a little further down the line. Let's stick to the 15th century right now. Meanwhile, Spain looked at what Portugal was doing and desperately wanted a piece of it. But with Portugal already dominating the Africa route, what were they to do? One Christopher Columbus had red accounts of travels in Asia, and also theoretical works about the size and distance of the world, and then concluded that they were all wrong and that he knew better. Despite the pretty accurate consensus at the time that a voyage west across the Atlantic to the Indies would have to cross 2500 leagues of ocean, Columbus using his own methods of calculation to do so that it was only about 800 leagues. Columbus was wrong. The consensus had got it right, despite not knowing that two massive continents were in the way. Those new continents just happened to be about as far as Columbus thought it was to China and India. Before he went to Spain, Columbus shopped the idea for this voyage around to all kinds of other monarchs, and they all turned him down. And they were smart for it. But when Columbus approached Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, the faltering Iberian kingdom was desperate enough to try anything. The Portuguese had already found a way around Africa, and Spain worried that Portugal would get all the advantages and takeover. They needed a big play to compete, so they took a risk and financed Columbus. So in 1492, with his three ships and an Arabic interpreter, and pre-written letters of introduction to Asian rulers, Columbus set sail to the west. I think everyone knows the anecdote by now that Columbus died still thinking he had found a new route to Asia. This is true, but even while he was in denial, other Europeans quickly realized that entirely new lands had been discovered, and an exploration race ensued. This led the Spanish and the Portuguese to sign the Treaty of Torsidias, in which they divided the world between them along a line drawn down the center of the North Atlantic. Neither kingdom really had any idea what was in either quadrant, and yet they divided the rest of the known world between themselves. All this to emphasize once again that it was mainly luck, and not guns and superior technology, which ensured European fortunes in the new world. So if European technology wasn't so great, what was it exactly, and how did native Indians respond to it? Well, it's true that at first they might have been dazzled by some of it, especially the loud and flashy texts, like guns. But despite recent European mastery of the seas, the relative technological positions of both sides were closer than is commonly believed. Native Americans were not technologically inferior to Europeans. They had different backgrounds and different types of tech, but terms like superior and inferior don't really apply. For instance, the different food production strategies of hattil agriculture and animal husbandry, versus great burnings and continental pasturing and literal landscaping of black earth, which system is better. It's honestly hard to say. Guns actually are a great example. They aren't the game changing flawless victory technology that is often portrayed today, at least not yet in the 16th century. Useful for Europeans at first to be sure, as their explosions and smoke were terrifying to those who had never encountered it. But natives quickly figured out that most Europeans were terrible shots, and that the guns themselves were wildly inaccurate. Whereas most Indians in their prime were crack shots with the much more useful bow and arrow. Intrenched in their home turf, when colonizers and native skirmish, the colonizers were often picked off one by one from sniper like arrows. In fact, Europeans were impressed with all sorts of other American technologies as well, especially in regards to food, agriculture and housing. Coming from lands plagued by famine, the foreigners from Europe were odd by Indian productivity, enormous yields of maize and other crops, and their more comfortable lifestyles from their perfectly insulated houses, right down to their shoes. Most Europeans ditched their boots for a far more comfy pair of moccasins as soon as they got the chance. I also have to mention boats. Natives hadn't built craft which could conquer the oceans, true, but their canoes were far better at navigating rivers and rocky coastlines than small European boats, which they literally paddled circles around. So you see, even within a generation of discovering the Americas, Europe's advantage and superiority was, by no means obvious. Really, anything could have happened. The largest factor in what did happen is disease, and I'll come back to that shortly, but it also just so happened that the Americas had an endless supply of treasures and wealth for Europeans to exploit. You could say that they rolled critical successes on their exploration checks, not only the obvious of silver and gold, but also wealth in food and agriculture. You see, all that golden silver making European eyes grow so big and their appetites grow so much greedier may have driven the politics and thinking of people during the day itself, but over the long term, the transfer of foods between the old world and the new would have far greater consequences for European wealth and so-called superiority, as well as for world history more broadly. There are two main ways that the Colombian exchange expanded the global supply of agricultural goods and gave Europe a boost. First was the introduction of previously unknown species from the Americas into the old world, improving everyone's caloric intake and nutrition, not to mention quality of meals and taste. Secondly, the discovery of the Americas provided the old world with vast quantities of land already shaped by Indians for cultivation and agriculture. High demand crops in old world markets like sugar, coffee, soybeans, citrus and bananas were all introduced into the new world, and the new world, the Americas, quickly became the main supplier of these crops globally. In short, you've got a one-two booster of new world crops into the old world, and then new world lands, incredibly well suited for old world crops. Do you follow me? The point is, Europeans could now feed themselves like never before. The coming together of the two continents and their cuisines and ingredients was the reason behind the population explosion that was to come in the next two centuries, and therefore it was what shaped and drove the industrial revolution that was to come in a few hundred years more, and skyrocket Europe into being the dominant power of the world. So maybe forget about guns and steel if I haven't made that clear enough already. Food was once again the central engine of history. Keeping those broad strokes in mind, let's jump into all the details of the major crops and ingredients, which had the biggest impacts on the exchange. First up, you know I have to talk about corn one more time, as well as the other game-changing staples like cassava, potato and sweet potato. In addition to their usefulness and caloric value, these starchy, new world roots and grains could be grown in European and Asian and African climates that were unsuitable for the cultivation of traditional staples from the old world like wheat and rice. Soils prior to 1492 that had been deemed useless because of their sandiness, altitude, aridity and other things were were now usable. American foods made different amounts on soil and had different growing seasons. In many cases, these crops didn't compete with old world crops, but rather complemented them. Maze, maize, corn, call it what you want, it changed the world. Because of the built-in diversity in varieties bred by Indians over generations, corn could and did spread all over the planet. Italy and nearby South and Central Europe became the most dependent on it, but corn reduced global hunger overall and helped fuel the major population boom. Corn meal, corn cakes, polenta, it fit into European food just fine. Today in many African countries like Lasotho, Malawi and Zambia, the average person consumes an astonishing 1500 calories a day from corn alone. But that's not even the most widely adopted crop. There's cassava and then of course, the potato, arguably the biggest impact around the old world of all. The potato is special because it sustains life better than any other food around, when consumed as the sole ingredient of a diet. Humans can survive healthily on a diet of mostly just potatoes, supplemented with only milk or butter, which contain the two vitamins not provided by potatoes A and D. This was the typical Irish diet, which although monotonous could provide sufficient amounts of nutrition to countless people. Analysis of the data shows that potatoes may explain as much as 12% of population increase after its adoption into the old world. Some historians argue that, therefore, potatoes are responsible for 47% increase in urbanization. So that about covers the big staples, but what about all those other foods, which may have not had the caloric bonafides of potatoes, corn and cassava, but provided other vitamins and nutrients, and also enriched culinary attitudes and cuisines. Let's start with chili peppers, which won't be the first time we've talked spicy food on this podcast. As we covered in episodes 3, 5 and 10, capsized some peppers probably originated in what is today Bolivia and southern Brazil, but quickly spread to Mesoamerica and the Caribbean where they were mass cultivated. One particular variety, domesticated in Mesoamerica, went on to become the ancestor to nearly every chili pepper around today, including all the Asian ones as well as bell peppers. Chili's arrived in Spain and Africa by 1493, so pretty quickly after contact. They took a little longer to reach India and East Asia, almost another hundred years actually. In the meantime, paprika, the spice made from grinding dried peppers, was widely adopted into a variety of Hungarian dishes, including goulash, of course, and, is today, the country's national spice. But, of course, south and southeast Asian cooks loved spicy chilies on an entirely different level from everybody else. Some form of chili pepper is used in the base of just about every dish or curry you can think of. Even certain regions of China, more known for a long and szechuan pepper, have adopted chilies into their favorite foods. Think who Nan Quizzine? And then of course, there's Korea, who made chilies in a central part of kimchi, their most ubiquitous side dish consumed with and used as an ingredient in just about every meal. We'll talk about kimchi a little bit more in future episodes, but I'll just move on and say that all these chilies may have not been giving people a lot of calories, but that doesn't mean that they didn't have health advantages. Chilies have lots of iron and magnesium, and more vitamin A than any other plant food. They're also rich in vitamin B, have more vitamin C than citrus if they're eaten raw. Additionally, capsaicin, the compound which makes chili spicy, is a digestive aid. Irritating oral glands, increasing saliva flow, and therefore easing the passage of food from the mouth into the stomach. While spicy chili peppers seem to have caught on right away, it took tomatoes a little bit longer. Probably not at first recognized as edible or even useful, the first documented authentic recipe in Italy of course, doesn't appear until 1692. The original term, palmadoro or golden apple, eaten then just like now with oil, salt, and pepper, suggests that the first tomatoes in Europe were golden colored and not red. Another difficulty in the spread of tomatoes was that they did not preserve well. Ripe tomatoes become putrid within days in hot climates. It wasn't until mechanization, centuries later, that tomatoes became a truly global food through canning. But boy have they. Today, nine out of the top 10 tomato consuming countries are in the old world. Greece consumes more than anybody, followed by many other Mediterranean and Middle Eastern countries. Believe it or not, Italy ranks just sixth in the per capita consumption of tomatoes. Exact rankings aside, it's clear that although tomatoes originated in the Americas, the old world are truly who fell in love with them. Similarly to chili peppers, while not rich in calories, tomatoes are a rich source of vitamins. And today they provide more nutrients in the average diet than just about any other fruit or veggie worldwide. Moving right along in the foods we've covered in detail before but are giving new post 1492 context to, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention chocolate and vanilla. Vanilla is the only edible variety of the orchid family. It's unclear who exactly brought back the first vanilla to Europe. In any case though, it achieved quick popularity in Spain, where people were using it to flavor chocolate by the 1500s. By the time Hernán Cortez arrived in Tenochtitlan to ransack the Aztec Empire, Cacao and fermented vanilla beans were already being mass cultivated by farmers in the Yucatan, traded in large quantities all around Mesoamerica. It was Columbus himself who brought back the first specimens of chocolate to his Spanish benefactors Ferdinand and Isabella. Just like they saw it consumed in Mesoamerica, Europeans first drank their chocolate as expensive, frothy drinks, mainly confined to aristocratic parties. From Spain, chocolate spread to Italy, and then to France, and of course Switzerland. By the 1600s, chocolate drinks had gone from novelty beverages to a regular lunch and staple, even of the growing middle class during this time. Cacao and the chocolate made from it were one of those foods that really shifted and thrived in the opposite hemisphere from which it came from. The Spanish held a monopoly on its production into the colonial era, after which the French got into the game and began to grow and sell it from Martinique and St. Lucia. Meanwhile, the Dutch produced Cacao in Indonesia and eventually mainland Africa. Today, the West African countries of Cameroon, Ghana and Nigeria are among the world's largest producers of Cacao beans. Their neighbor, Cote de Vois, is number one in the world. Beyond noble courts, explorers and travelers found chocolate particularly useful as a high energy food with lifting psychological effects. Pure chocolate has a higher energy output per weight than most carb or protein-rich foods, making it an excellent choice for physically taxing expeditions where travelers need to minimize the weight they carry. Just for one example, the explorers on the very first track to the South Pole were getting 1,000 out of 4,500 of their calories per day, totally from chocolate. Today still, through hikers on long distance walks over great trails, still claim the Snickers bar as their favorite most mood and output-boosting food. Once cultivated only in one small corner of Mesoamerica, the Colombian exchange made chocolate a worldwide favorite food. I think we've covered the most significant new world crops that made their way to the Old World. Remember though, it wasn't just American foods moving to Europe. It didn't take long after Columbus's voyage to the Americas to discover that certain Old World crops were really well suited to American climates. In many cases, much more productive than they had been in their original soils back home. For example, not a food, but still a crop, 98% of the world's rubber, an American original, is now produced in the Old World from transplanted trees. Also, America exports 84% of the world's soybeans, giving China much of the massive supply of the crop it originally domesticated. But the most striking example of an Old World crop much more effectively growing in the Americas has got to be sugarcane. Though it was first grown in Southeast Asia, most of the world's land suitable for its cultivation is in the Americas. It was carried there as early as Columbus's second voyage in 1493, and first cultivated on Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic today. By 1509, slaves were being imported to increase production, more on that in a bit too. And by 1516, sugar was being exported to Europe in mass. By the end of the 16th century, the interests of the Portuguese, English, Dutch, and French had all turned to sugarcane. One consequence of all this sugar flowing out of the Americas was that for the first time in human history, there was a large enough supply of it that could be consumed by commoners. Average per capita income increased by orders of magnitude, mostly thanks to sugar. It provided a cheap and easy source of calories for the growing urban working class in Europe. It's hard to overstate sugar's importance to the betterment of the masses. Far from the poisonous, problematic, diabetic epidemic it is today, sugar's initial explosion increased welfare by an estimated 8%. This was of course to take a darker turn in the future. As sugar, as addictive as any drug, was used to malify and make dependent factory workers with poor wages and conditions. But that's the story for another podcast. All the success of plants crossing the hemispheres was not just a happy coincidence. It was written into history, climate, and geology. Think about it like this. All the major civilizations of the Old World tend to sprawl out from east to west. It's one of the reasons that Old World trade and contact so flourished, even between empires as distant as Imperial Rome and Han China. Whereas the Americas are laid out in a north-south orientation, and have their two culminating empires, the Aztec and the Inca, never really learning or hearing much about each other because of their difference in latitude. Because climates change drastically as you move north to south, and don't do so much from east to west, this helped ensure that the Old World plants could easily find a new world climate similar enough to their native one back home, and vice versa. Additionally, by moving to a similar but yet entirely new climate, species could escape all their natural predators, and so thrived in a safe environment, and maybe even completely took it over. Remember, until about 200 million years ago, Eurasia and the Americas were together as Pangaea, then broke apart and went no contact for millions of years. Evolution set their species on different trajectories. Flora, fauna, and animals diverged so far from each other that Columbus was astounded when he arrived and remarked, "All the trees are as different from ours as day from night, and so to the fruits, the herbage, the rocks, and all things." Columbus and crew were the first, and the last Europeans, to see this biological gap in its purist form. Their visit initiated the slow, but inevitable process of knitting the two continents back together, and making the hemispheres more alike again. As people mixed the world's organisms into a global stew, Columbus had started a change that there was no way he or anyone could have predicted or probably comprehended. An ecological explosion on a scale not seen since the ice age. In some cases, as we'll see, the effect was destruction and extinction, or at least severe decline. One of the most prominent examples being homo sapiens, who lost a fifth of their worldwide population. But other species, suddenly in new environments, without any of their natural predators, were transformed into super species, dominating their environment. In their home ecosystems, these species had parasites, microbes, virus, and predators to shorten their lives and keep their numbers in check. But suddenly free of this burden, they could burst out and overwhelm the landscape. Colonists in Jamestown complained about all the rats they'd accidentally imported. But also clover and bluegrass, tame and well under control in their native Europe, swept across American landscapes so fast that English colonists pushing into Kentucky found both species waiting for them there. Peaches, not usually considered a weed, spread across the southeast so vigorously that by the 1700s, farmers openly wondered if the carolinas would become a great forest of peach trees. South America was hit particularly hard by invasive species, and dive and spinach escaped from colonial gardens and grew into impassable six-foot thickets on the Peruvian coast. Thousands of feet higher up, mint, overwhelmed Andean valleys, and in Argentina and Uruguay, hundreds of square miles were strangled by, you guessed it, feral artichokes. All these invasive species, of course, suffocated and destroyed many local species on their rampages, wreaking havoc on local environments. Food chains and ecosystems are fragile things, and removing one, even a seemingly small thing, can have drastic consequences. When a species is so central to its food chain that it governs that entire ecosystems, overall composition, it is called a keystone species. And indigenous American homo sapiens were a keystone species across the Americas, until Columbus came. They burned half the continents foliage annually, cleared and replanted forests, built canals and raised fields, hunted bison and netted salmon, grew maize and squash and beans, and the whole rest of the American agricultural complex. Native Americans had been managing their environments for thousands of years. They'd made some mistakes, but overall modified their whole landscape into a stable, productive patchwork of strong systems. Some garden plots have persisted for millennia, surpassing over and over the time in which farmers in Mesopotamia and North Africa and the rest of the old world ruined their land from mass agriculture. Even where that mass farming was practiced in the eastern hemisphere, such as the vast terrorist valleys of the Andes, it was almost always in ways more sustainable than you see in the origins of civilizations and farming in the old world. But it required a lot of maintenance and oversight. When disease came to remove the Indians, they removed the cultivators. Species like bison and passenger pigeons, hunted and managed by Indians, suddenly had population explosions and ran a muck over the American landscapes. So too did the vast permaculture forest overgrow and create a giant artificial wilderness which wasn't there before when the Indians were managing things. This explains the ruggedness of the American continent across US history. US American pioneers and colonists found more forest and wilderness in the 17th and 18th centuries than was there in the centuries before. That wilderness was captivating and beautiful to be sure, but it only existed because millions and millions of people had died. It is indeed time to delve into the darker aspects of all of this. Why at the very end, I'll clarify shortly. All this exciting change in world cuisine, all this food we've been having fun talking about is undercut by tragedy. Not only ingredients were exchanged, but microbes and disease. Likely, only syphilis originated in the new world and transferred to the old, but the list of infectious diseases that spread from Europe to the new world is long. The old world, i.e. the people who'd spent thousands of years raising and living with farm animals. The major killers include smallpox, measles, whooping cough, chickenpox, the bubonic plague, typhus, and malaria. Because native populations had no previous contact with old world diseases, or even much domestic animals of their own. Before contact, they'd lived a relatively disease-free environment, and thus they were immunologically defenseless. Given the vast differences between the old and the new world ways of life, the horrible spectre of disease was inevitable. Even so though, things didn't have to turn out as bad for the Indians as it did, and the fact that the Europeans were ignorant, of the diseases they brought with them, does not let them, or us, their descendants, off the hook, for stealing two continents of land. The cruelty and the inhumanity of the European visitors, starting with Columbus and his destruction of the Taino people in the Caribbean, made sure that the inevitable horror of disease would be an end for the vast majority of Indians, an end from which they could never recover, really. We may never know the exact magnitude of the depopulation. It's estimated that upwards of 80 to 95 percent of all native populations were wiped out within a hundred or 150 years after contact. The uncertainty of those exact figures is because we don't know the extent to which disease may have swept ahead of explorers and depopulated regions before European observers were there to make physical contact, count how many people were there, and record it. This caused the first hand accounts and perceptions of American Indian populations to be biased way downwards than they probably were. Even today, we really have no idea how many people lived in the Americas before 1492. Some estimates are as low as about 8 million people, but most historians now believe it was much, much higher. The highest estimates are as many as 110 million people, which in pre-industrial times is unheard of. Perhaps that figure is a bit high, by 70 million, 80 million? Given what we do know, it's unlikely to be too much lower than that. We're talking about a lot of people here. By all accounts, before European contact, most of the new world was densely populated with humans and settlements. A whole hemisphere of civilizations cut short. Two continents' worth of peoples and societies were ended. Only the smaller spread out more tribal and nomadic and less susceptible to infectious disease peoples remained. Further biasing Europeans' perceptions of what Indian civilization was like. Indeed, the very first Europeans to push into the continent found populated mounds and farming towns densely spreading over the landscape as far as was known. By the time the next wave of colonists and explorers arrived, though, those coasts were empty. Grave yards and overgrown fields and forests, disease moves far faster than human people. It may have been that the European love of pork was what truly doomed indigenous populations. As they plowed their way blindly into what was to them a new continent, European explorers brought their pigs with them. As domestic farm animals, pigs make great carriers and transmitters of diseases between animals and humans. Diseases which, like we said, the Native Americans had no previous experience with. Europeans decided that this was God's providence, that he should provide them with a continent that was both vast and recently emptied of all people, but the primitive and uncivilized. When really, diseases from the Old World had already wrecked all the civilized civilizations. The exchange between the Old World and the New brought out the worst kinds of traits humanity has to offer. Greed, plunder, desire for treasure, murder and conquest on a continental scale, and don't forget slavery. Before the Colombian exchange, this ancient barbaric practice of human slaves had not entirely died out, but it was almost unheard of across civilizations in the Old World. Discovery and plunder of the New World brought it back. Colonists and explorers seized too many resources, more than they could handle. The solution was to exploit Native populations any chance they got. As we hinted at earlier, Columbus himself is almost entirely responsible for the downfall of the Taino population on his Spaniola, and that's really literally just the beginning. But with millions of Indian peoples snuffed out by disease, there was soon a labor shortage, a slave labor shortage. Naturally, the Europeans said, well, there's still a whole other continent back across the ocean that we haven't exploited yet, as we covered so chipperly just moments ago. New world foods like maniac, cassava, sweet potatoes, and corn came to Africa and transformed their agricultural landscape, greatly increasing population in the process. All those extra people are what made the slave trade possible. Millions were snatched from their homeland and taken to a new continent for a life of bondage. I'm sorry to end this episode on such a down note, but I felt like it would have been a bit morally dishonest to try and get all the tragedy out of the way and then try to turn the tone around by ending on a more cheerful note. The legacy of what happened in and after 1492 is still with us today. Not just the industrial and globalized society which was made possible by the great exchange of foods between the hemispheres, but just as much so the darker side. The unseemly stuff we don't want to think about when trying to justify being the greatest country in the world. A great founded on the bountiful continent already built and cultivated, but emptied by diseases we brought and the cruelty we inflicted and then built on the back of slavery. I don't think that means we can't enjoy and appreciate the cuisine birth from the Columbia in exchange. It's possible for something to be both good and bad at the same time. The spread of foods and agricultural technologies across the oceans and around the world is a good thing, a net benefit for humanity, but it came at a terrible, terrible cost, consequences which are ancestors bear culpability in, and it's important to remember that. Embrace the messiness and the duality of our history. That's the only way to get it something close to the truth of what really happened. I hope that by leaving you with that and the somber end note that those truths stay with you just a little bit longer and more clearly than they might otherwise. That's the end of this episode and the end of the second season of the history of food. The show will return in January. Believe it or not, I once envisioned this episode about the Columbia in exchange to be the end of the podcast. It's a pretty stark and striking transition between the world of antiquity and the Middle Ages and the modern one. I wasn't sure if a modern food history podcast was something that this audience or even myself wanted. Not to mention that there are other great podcasts out there that already do this modern food history. But don't worry, I realize that there are plenty more ideas and societies to talk about as the world makes that transition from old to modern. Food of course will very much shape the way modern humanity makes and discovers itself in the episodes to come. We haven't even talked about tea and coffee yet. But in the meantime, if any of you listeners have feedback on this question, I'd love to hear from you on social media. In the future, would you rather listen to a history of food that follows the timeline all the way up to the present day? Or is your heart still set in the ancient past as mine often is? We could circle back and delve more deeply into specific topics of antiquity. So really, what do you think? Let me know and I'll see you on Facebook, Twitter, and of course anthrochef.blog. Otherwise, I'll see you in 2020. Thanks for listening.