The Columbian Exchange
Two biological worlds separated for 12,000 years are joined, and everything changes.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 300 years
- Known to
- ± 50 years
- Era
- Early Modern, Holocene
Maize, potatoes, tomatoes, cassava, chillies, tobacco and cacao cross to the Old World; wheat, rice, sugar, cattle, pigs, horses and sheep cross west. The nutritional effect is enormous — potatoes and maize eventually feed population growth across Europe, Africa and China — and so is the ecological one. Alfred Crosby, who named it in 1972, argued it is the single most important event in the history of life since the end of the Pleistocene.