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The Colonization Of The Americas

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“Ancestors” immigrated to the Americas while searching for game. After glaciers melted and sea levels rose, immigrants were stuck on the Americas. Corn was essential for Native American civilizations in Mexico and South America. Scandinavians indirectly discovered the Americas, quickly abandoned it. Bartholomeu Dias rounded the southernmost tip of Africa in 148, 10 years later Vasco da Gama finally reached India. Slavery was a crucial industry. Printing presses, introduced around 1450, facilitated the spread of scientific. Columbus accidentally discovered the Americas while looking for the fabled “Inndies”, so he called them Indians. Americas supplied Europeans with agricultural needs, such as potato, maize. Europeans unleashed cattle, swine, and horses. Horses soon were a part of Native American tribes and used for hunting. Columbus also introduced sugar causing the “Sugar Revolution” which thrived in the warm climate of the Caribbean. Consequently, Columbus also brought diseases such as yellow fever, malaria, and smallpox. Years of isolation ridded the Native Americans of antibodies, within 50 years of the Spanish arrival the Taino natives dwindled from about 1 million to 200. As revenge the New World infected the Spanish with syphilis. Spain secured Columbus’s findings with the Treaty of Tordesillas and Portugal received compensating territory in Africa and Asia, as well as title lands that would soon become Brazil. Vasco Nunez Balboa discovered Pacific Ocean in 1513.

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