World Trade And Biological Exchanges Before 1492

People moved into America very early across the Bering Strait. By the fifth millennia B.C.E. tropical sailors brought diseases to America and took plants and animals in both directions. Long before Columbus, tropical sailors carefully selected crops from New World highlands and shorelines, wet and dry climates, and took them to the Old World where they were grown in appropriate environments. Medicinal and psychedelic plants were traded and maintained in Egypt and Peru during separate, 1,400-year periods. This implies that maritime trade was continuous. In this groundbreaking book, learn about: ● 84 plants that were taken from the Americas to the Old World. ● What plants and animals were brought to the Americas. ● Why world trade was essential for transfer of so many. ● Interconnectedness of civilizations had to result from world trade. ● Dating of 18 species by archaeology with radio carbon shows dispersal. ● And much more! Plants, diseases, and animals from America were distributed throughout the world, across the oceans before 1492. It is time for scientists, teachers, and students to reconsider their beliefs about the early history of civilization with World Trade and Biological Exchanges Before 1492. ABOUT THE AUTHORS: John L. Sorenson is an emeritus professor of anthropology at Brigham Young University. He earned a doctorate in archeology from UCLA. Carl L. Johannessen is an emeritus professor of biogeography at the University of Oregon. He earned a doctorate in geography from the University of California at Berkeley.

"People moved into America very early across the Bering Strait. By the fifth millennia B.C.E. tropical sailors brought diseases to America and took plants and animals in both directions. Long before Columbus, tropical sailors carefully selected crops from New World highlands and shorelines, wet and dry climates, and took them to the Old World where they were grown in appropriate environments. Medicinal and psychedelic plants were traded and maintained in Egypt and Peru during separate, 1,400-year periods. This implies that maritime trade was continuous. In this groundbreaking book, learn about: 84 plants that were taken from the Americas to the Old World; what plants and animals were brought to the Americas; why world trade was essential for transfer of so many; interconnectedness of civilizations had to result from world trade; and dating of 18 species by archaeology with radio carbon shows dispersal."--Publisher's description.

Paints a compelling picture of impressive pre-Columbian cultures and Old World civilizations that, contrary to many prevailing notions, were not isolated from one another In Ancient Ocean Crossings: Reconsidering the Case for Contacts with the Pre-Columbian Americas, Stephen Jett encourages readers to reevaluate the common belief that there was no significant interchange between the chiefdoms and civilizations of Eurasia and Africa and peoples who occupied the alleged terra incognita beyond the great oceans. More than a hundred centuries separate the time that Ice Age hunters are conventionally thought to have crossed a land bridge from Asia into North America and the arrival of Columbus in the Bahamas in 1492. Traditional belief has long held that earth’s two hemispheres were essentially cut off from one another as a result of the post-Pleistocene meltwater-fed rising oceans that covered that bridge. The oceans, along with arctic climates and daunting terrestrial distances, formed impermeable barriers to interhemispheric communication. This viewpoint implies that the cultures of the Old World and those of the Americas developed independently. Drawing on abundant and concrete evidence to support his theory for significant pre-Columbian contacts, Jett suggests that many ancient peoples had both the seafaring capabilities and the motives to cross the oceans and, in fact, did so repeatedly and with great impact. His deep and broad work synthesizes information and ideas from archaeology, geography, linguistics, climatology, oceanography, ethnobotany, genetics, medicine, and the history of navigation and seafaring, making an innovative and persuasive multidisciplinary case for a new understanding of human societies and their diffuse but interconnected development.

The 500th anniversary of the Columbian discovery of America is upon us, and with it the obligation to assess existing interpretations of the significance of the voyage and establishment of permanent links between the Old and New Worlds. The traditional, or bardic, version of the Columbian voyages and their consequences was the product of narrative historians who wrote about the American past in ways consonant both with the documentary record then available and with the ethnocentrism of their fellow white citizens of the New World. Though popular, it is deceptive because it takes a selective view of history, reinforces Euro-American ethnocentrism, and confirms premises and approaches clearly obsolete in the late 20th century. The analytic interpretation takes a more scientific, less romantic view of the voyages, their motives and consequences. These historians open themselves to geology, climatology, biology, epidemiology, and other fields. They are scientific in their research and in attempts to limit bias. Examples of historical interpretation from each school of thought are presented. The Columbian influence on the Old and New Worlds is assessed; and intellectual, economic, nutritional, and demographic effects are discussed. Finally, the legacy of the Columbian exchange is reviewed in terms of its effects on world population and ethnic composition. (GEA)

Pre-Columbian Sailors Influenced the World is about the spread and diffeusion of plants, animals, doseases, and culture across the world's oceans long before Christopher Columbus ever sailed from Europe. This book details, in an easy-to-understand fashion, the abundnace of evidence available proving that humans from tropical cultures around the world sailed across both the Padifid and Atlantic Oceans long before the Eurpoean Christain Age of Expansion, These earlier sailors brought plants, animals, and some diseases as well as shared cultural traits with other societies they met across the oceans. The evidence shows that mariners sailed from the Americas to China, India, many of the Pacific Islands, Africa, and the Middle East as well as to the Americas from Asia, Africa, India, some of the Pacific Islands, and Northern Europe. This book is a must-read if one wants to understand the true spread of civilization and culutral sharing around the tropical and subtropical worlds by non-European, non-White cultures. In this day of rising fear of foreigners it is imperative that we acknowledge and celebrate the contributions to world culture made by the people of the tropics.

More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed totally different suites of plants and animals. Columbus's voyages brought them back together--and marked the beginning of an extraordinary exchange of flora and fauna between Eurasia and the Americas.

A companion book for young readers based upon the explorations of the Americas in 1491, before those of Christopher Columbus.

Moore follows the history of the disease from its first recorded appearance in Asia and Africa to Arabia and finally to Europe and America. he then provides a history of treatment, including three chapters on the discovery and reception of inoculation. Moore was an early advocate of vaccination, and this book is dedicated to Edward Jenner. In 1810 Moore was appointed director of the National Vaccine Establishment.

The biological mingling of the Old and New Worlds began with the first voyage of Columbus. The exchange was a mixed blessing: it led to the disappearance of entire peoples in the Americas, but it also resulted in the rapid expansion and consequent economic and military hegemony of Europeans. Amerindians had never before experienced the deadly Eurasian sicknesses brought by the foreigners in wave after wave: smallpox, measles, typhus, plague, influenza, malaria, yellow fever. These diseases literally conquered the Americas before the sword could be unsheathed. From 1492 to 1650, from Hudson's Bay in the north to southernmost Tierra del Fuego, disease weakened Amerindian resistance to outside domination. The Black Legend, which attempts to place all of the blame of the injustices of conquest on the Spanish, must be revised in light of the evidence that all Old World peoples carried, though largely unwittingly, the germs of the destruction of American civilization.