Through voyages to the Americas, the Old World gained new crops, such as potatoes, maize, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, cacao, peanuts, and most importantly, tobacco. They also gained new supplies of metals and a few new birds. Additionally, crops such as coffee and sugar from the Old World found a flourishing environment in parts of the New World. Flora wasn’t the only thing to make its way across the Atlantic; fauna also were exchanged. Before the arrival of the Europeans, the Native Americans had no large domestic animals. Horses were brought from Europe, along with animals we think of as commonplace today, like pigs, sheep, cattle, and many more. The New World contributed llamas, guinea pigs, and fowl, including the wild turkey, which was brought back to Europe. The turkey then adapted to its environment and became the turkey that modern-day people are familiar …show more content…
The Europeans and natives also exchanged diseases. The Native Americans’ isolation from the other side of the Atlantic made them highly susceptible to disease from the Asian and African continents that Europeans already built up an immunity to, so when the explorers made contact with the natives, they transferred diseases like small pox, malaria, yellow fever, bubonic plague and many more, which caused epidemics amongst the native peoples. Similarly, the natives had diseases that the other side of the Atlantic had never been exposed to. The most prominent disease that the sailors took back with them was syphilis, an STD, and it’s thought that they could have even brought back