The Long Way Back to Ourselves

5.4

Fourteen Ninety-Two: The Exchange That Rebuilt the World

This episode follows what actually crossed the Atlantic after 1492, not just conquest, but plants, animals, and pathogens that reshaped both hemispheres' diets and ecologies. It stresses the Americas, unlike Eurasia, had almost no large herd animals besides the llama, and draws on historian Alfred Crosby's concept of ecological imperialism. You learn horse culture among Plains peoples, often imagined as ancient, is actually a product of the 17th and 18th centuries, since horses went extinct there and returned only with Europeans. The episode uses the Irish famine of the 1840s to argue a blight is natural but a famine is a distribution problem, closing on the Americas' pre-contact population, estimated at 20 to over 100 million.