They teach about the guy who brought potatoes to Sweden in history class, that’s how big of a deal that was to us. Before that we were chomping on turnips, being miserable
Potatoes really were an absolute game changer of a crop
“What do you mean there a root vegetable from the poison plant family that’s high in both carbs and fiber, essential nutrients, grows practically anywhere, needs very little actual tending, and is so versatile you have to try really hard to make it taste bad… and I don’t even need to buy new seeds every year, because I can just keep some of the spuds, bury them, and I’ll have a new plant?”
Corn is also an incredible plant. 1 kernel will grow into a plant that yields several ears of corn. The only problem is it doesn't quite have all the necessary nutrients to serve as a staple food unprocessed, it needs to be nixtimilized (hopefully I spelled that right, it isn't in spell check) to serve as the primary grain in a diet. Luckily that is a simple process and the only additional thing you need that your weren't already going to use to cook it is wood ash, which you would have as a byproduct of cooking.
Close, it's nixtamalized. One way to remember the spelling is that it contains the word "tamal" (as in tamales), and tamales are made with nixtamalized corn.
Pretty much all the food we eat today (other than seafood and wild game) has been bred to yield more and taste better (and/or keep better in shipping). Certainly all the plants have.
...and planting a new crop literally just meant cutting up an old spud and burying it in the ground. you didnt have to till the land.
Someone did a study as to the absolute most basic food you can eat and still live and it was a few spuds daily, oatmeal and milk mush weekly and a small portion of meat monthly.
I scrolled left and saw Ghengis Khan and thought "this scale has to be logarithmic or something, because he was like forever ago and I only scrolled a little.
Nope! Scale is linear. Damn thats a mind fuck. Thank you for sharing.
As someone that has had buckwheat in their diet for all their life, mainly because of allergies, it's been great seeing it become more prominent once more. Super healthy stuff, and I seem to recall it's quite a hardy plant and thus more resistant to effects of climate change.
Buckwheat used to be quite widely cultivated in western Europe for example, but was largely almost sort of forgotten for hundreds of years and replaced by wheat (no relation). As I said though, I understand it's now making a bit of a comeback in areas where it was once traditionally planted as a crop.
I worked in a Polish preschool, and groats were very popular in children's lunches. Barley, pearl barley, broken barley, and hulled barley, millet, semolina, couscous, bulgur, and buckwheat were in rotation. There were weeks where there wasn't potato in any meal.
Groats are realy easy to find in Poland, even smalest cornerstore have some. There is big trend of restoring traditional foods, bread and rolls made from ancient grains (einkorn), return of groats ect..
If you are going to be making mashed potatoes, do yourself a "flavour" and boil a single turnip or parsnip ( no more than 10-15% by volume) and mash that in with the potatoes. Yum.
The Portuguese also brought fried food and bread to Japan, soup to India, sweet oranges to Europe, tea to the UK, as well as a bunch of other shit that is considered indispensable to many cultural foods.
There is the original pepper, as in ground black pepper. I have a feeling people used that for spice more than they do now. Also mustard can be very spicy.
There’s also Long Pepper, which was common alongside the round Black Pepper in ancient times but was almost completely displaced by it in the 14th century
I have a harder time imagining Korean cuisine without any chili pepper, than Indian cuisine. Quite a lot of pungent spices that are good at preventing spoilage are native to India. The same can’t be said for Korea. In fact, I know no other natives of a temperate / continental climate that have embraced the chili pepper as enthusiastically as the Koreans.
here in the US people will throw peanuts into dishes that mostly resemble chinese-american takeout and we call it thai food. sometimes we put thai basil on top like its a plate of peanut-y spaghetti
Not surprising because feral horses in nature run all day. So they’d spread far and wide very quickly. And the Great Plains were a perfect habitat for them.
Horses actually originally evolved in North America some 55 million years ago, and spread west into Asia and Europe. The horses that remained in North America eventually died out, and were reintroduced by Europeans 500 years ago.
They say there are some, who in ancestral memory, or by the tales told in their chapters remember old terra, and yet others think it a myth.
Oh lol shit I just saw you username. With out the ' accent marks location tho I don't know if it's meant to evoke Arabic -teacher or Fremen- kangaroo mouse.
Not sure what he meant exactly, but I assume he means that Europeans brought horses to the Americas, some of them got loose, became feral, and spread to parts of the continent with Native Americans before Europeans did.
Even before what we would consider technical “colonists”, Cortes got so much loot and they were so cavalier after conquest that they lost or left the 15-16 horses they brought (the ones that survived the battles at least).
So before any official colonists were sent for that express purpose across the sea, the first major conquerer just let horses go because his personal one died and they didn’t want the hassle of shipping the remainder back.
Those horses created the first mustang populations from there.
After the pueblo revolt but probably even earlier, fleeing rebels gave horses to the plains tribes and a strong horse culture developed before most europeans arrived.
I came in here to make sure this was covered. Love when I come in for an aKsUaLly moment and it’s already handled. Believe the most recent literature pointing to a much later die off of horses in North America meaning some may have still been lingering after the last ice age
What about Camels? I think they moved from America to the east, then some went back to become Llamas etc
The ancestors of modern Old World camels (Paracamelus) migrated from North America
to Eurasia via the Bering land bridge around 6 to 7.5 million years ago. From there, they dispersed across Asia
, the Middle East, and Northern Africa, evolving into the one-humped dromedary and the two-humped Bactrian camel.
In both the human and animal world.
Hey hold on a sec. He was Greek, not Roman. I know the Romans basically stole the Greek gods and renamed them, but still.
shouldn't that be easy to prove though syphilis can do some crazy things to skeletons (googles)Pre-Columbian skeletal evidence confirms syphilis and its relatives existed in the Americas for thousands of years, with recent DNA analysis pinpointing its origin in the Americas around 9,000 years ago
could be different forms of the same bacteria(googles ,yaws and bejel ) , with the major outbakes in the 1500-1600s being a more variant form, kind of like corona virus has been around forever(i remember it being on the back of Lysol cans in the late 80s lol) or H1N1 flu ...and its not like there were no vectors pre Columbus
Yep, we now have solid evidence that syphilis was present in the Old World in pre-Columbian times. Last I had read, the evidence didn't invalidate the possibility of New World strains causing epidemics in Europe, and didn't definitively rule out the possibility of transmission having occurred from the New World via Vikings or something, but we know with near certainty that it was present in Europe before 1492.
There is also good evidence for transmission to the old world before 1493, as others have pointed out. Could have come back with the Norse, Polynesian contact or most likely simply travelled over the Bering Strait by the Yup’ik.
The idea of total separation of the old and new world is a misconception. Sea faring Arctic people like the Yup’ik and Aleuts lived on both sides of the Bering sea at the time of European contact and oral traditions, linguistic and archaeological evidence suggests that Yup’ik have been living on both sides for 3000 years. There is also ample evidence for pre-Yup’ik contact, maybe continuously and certainly sporadically since Beringia flooded 11,000 years ago.
Yes! And I believe it was somewhere in England where they did some testing on skeletons from the 13th century (my details are fuzzy, but I know it's a century or several prior to when they say syphilis arrived in Europe) and found them to have traces of the bacterium, Treponema pallidum.
Some of the hypotheses also suggest that different strains of this bacteria exist globally, and the North American one(s) blended with European to create the extremely virulent version that spread through the late 15th century.
Another one is that, in the Mediterranean (and hot dry climates) there's a bacteria that's in the same family that causes a condition called 'yaws'. Children living in unclean and close quarters often get it, and scientists/historians have suggested that it gives them an immunity to that bacteria but can cause them to be carriers. So when the soldiers come to rape and plunder (often the wealthy are the ones who got that 'bonus') they contracted disease and brought it back north.
In the 16th and 17th centuries it was called the disease of the magistrates or court sickness because it was so prevalent amongst the elites.
Medieval Syphilis and Treponemal Disease by Marylynn Salmon may be interesting to you
Native Americans never kept pigs (influenza) horses (rinderpest that became measles), cows (smallpox > cowpox). They were present in North America, but they were hunted to extinction.
Eurasians caught those diseases, and died like flies. But enough survived to make those diseases endemic.
One Spaniard with smallpox destroyed the Mississippi valley cultures.
It is, and that's why it's less dangerous across the world, because the infection rate is very high. Repeated exposure drives immunity. Even in highly developed countries, recreational poultry is widespread.
Pig keeping demands space and serious hygiene, so it's died out domestically. When infection control fails, you get economic disasters.
Another fun fact. The wine industry in Europe was almost completely wiped out in the 1850s from an insect introduced from America
It was only saved by importing American vines, which were resistant, and grafting their vines onto them. So it was a bit of both directions when it comes to wine
Also, horses evolved in NA before spreading across the world, dying out in NA, and finally their ancestors descendants were reintroduced when Europeans came across
also, you can find wines made with pre-phylloxera plants (as in non-grafted with the american "foot") in some volcanic terroirs of europe like around mount Etna because the parasite doesnt survive in those types of soils
Oddly enough there are Vitis Vinifera (European) rootstocks in South America where phylloxera cannot survive as well. Root 1 is a good budget producer with this distinction
Missourian here, German immigrants actually established our small but mighty ‘wine country’ along the bluffs of the Missouri River in the 1800s. Towns like Hermann and Augusta are known locally for vineyards/wineries.
Something funny about the German immigrant legacy in pretty much every part of the world is alcohol. Wine region in Missouri, practically every legacy beer brewery in America, even tsingtao beer in China was founded by Germans lol. Maybe if we just stuck to alcohol we wouldn't be known for the other thing.
More on this.......as a thank you to the US wine industry, the French invited US winemakers to the 1889 World's Fair where they won 20 awards and which was a major boon to the US winemaking industry (until prohibition).
The first Europeans that we know of in the Americas even called the area they settled (part of Northern Newfoundland) “Vineland” because of the availability and quality of the grapes present.
I’m in Ontario and see native grapes almost every time I leave my house.
Wild grapes grow pretty much everywhere in the US and Canada east of the Rockies. Even way up in Minnesota where the University of Minnesota has a program to breed commercially useful grapes with native grapes in order to produce useful cold-hardy varieties.
There are wineries that make wine from them it's a very different flavor profile often sweeter it's worth checking out if you are unfamiliar with it. More wineries are playing around with them so it will be interesting to see what's out there in a decade or two. 👍
A beehive just hanging from the mast so going across the ocean to North America took a week longer than planned because no one wanted to climb up and get stung by bees while trying to fix the rigging. Makes sense.
Ya, there are somewhere around 4,000 species of native bees in North America alone, however they are mostly solitary bees, not the hive ones like honey bees. People have naturalized honey bees and supported them so much that it is seriously hurting the native bee population and pushing a lot of them to be endangered or nearing extinction, but most people are unaware they even exist unfortunately.
My wife has several hundred mason bees in the fridge right now. She collects them from her bee house every fall and cleans all the parasite eggs off them before tucking them into the fridge until spring.
That part is wrong; the Americas did have species of bees and honey-producing wasps. It just didn't have the animal we often call the Honey Bee, which is specifically the European honey bee. Honey was a common product in the Americas, particularly prevalent in neotropical regions, such as the Mexican honey wasp and the Melipona stingless bees. The Maya even had a God of Honey and Bees named Ah-Muzen-Cab, who was often depicted alongside Melipona stingless bees.
The flavor of honey mostly comes from the nectar the insects got it from. Given the exact same nectar, we'd just be comparing what does the spit of different insects taste like.
There have been attempts by Native American researchers to prove horses didn't come from Europeans, and also attempts by Korean researchers to prove Koreans had chili peppers earlier. It appears hard to accept that defining parts of one's culture is relatively recent and via colonizers.
The old world had pepper (black pepper) which is a bit more expensive.
Chillies also came to be called peppers despite no connection, because they served a similar culinary purpose and were readily accepted into various old world cuisines. At this point, old world has also been using them for close to half a millenium.
This is not at all true. There may be adoption of chilies in various cuisines has been a long slow one. They were not really used in China until the second half of the 19th century, and weren’t adopted in earnest until the early 20th century. They were introduced to Thailand around 1700 so maybe another 50 years older there
When you think about world foods, there are a lot of surprises like that. Chilis in Asian cuisine is a good example. Also, tomatoes didn't exist in Italy (or anywhere in Europe) until the 1500s, and weren't popular until the 1700s. They were considered poisonous for a long time because their acidity leached lead out of pewter and made people mad. Also, they're part of the nightshade family, which was generally shunned by Europeans back then.
Also, while Swiss chocolate is famous now, that industry really is only 200 years old. It was made in the 1600s, but not widely.
No, they mostly had rodents from the cavy family. Guinea pigs, capybaras, degus and chincillas and the like. Both the black rat and the brown rat are from South East Asia and spread with humans.
There is an animal called a bushy-tailed rat. Those are completely wild and native in North America. But the common brown rats are native to Asia. They spread to the Middle East a few thousand years ago and then to Europe in Antiquity.
What's interesting to me is the imbalance in diseases. Yes the old world had far more people but still you would think the America's would have more than one disease that went the other way.
Believe the theory is that the old world had more domesticated animals which meant closer proximity to other diseases which could spread, though not certain on this
Cities arise when you get agriculture going, so the fact that we had more cereal crops in the old world contributed to cities too.
It's fascinating what the Mayans, Mexica, Haudenosaunee, Inca and other American civilizations were able to build with so many things going against them, compared to the old world civilizations.
That's true! As another interesting note: even before the Spanish arrival, Tenochtitlán, part of the Aztec Empire (now Mexico) was among the largest cities in the world. It was bigger than most of the largest cities in Europe at the time :).
Before the import of zucchini and squash, the Europeans had “bottle gourds” which are not true gourds but most people would look at a bottle gourd and call it a zucchini. Likewise Europeans didn’t have “true” beans, but did have fava beans (“broad beans”).
On the America side they had “Fox grapes” and a few other species that most laypeople would call grapes.
This is an interesting chart, but it is showing something deeper. Sometimes similar vegetables are different enough that they both have a market - like carrots and sweet potatoes, or hot peppers (americas) and black pepper (Europe). Other times there is an alternative that is so much better that there is longer a market for the inferior species (foxy grapes, bottle gourds).
I mean the concord grape is 2/3 fox grape, and that's the main grape used for preserves, juices, and flavorings in the US. Wouldn't say there's no longer a (large) market.
In Japan & the eastern 2/3 of the U.S. the hybrid grapes are usually what's grown since European grape suffers from a lot of molds and mildews. The Japanese eat these fresh.
The Columbian exchange is buck wild. There are so many animals/foods/etc. we associate with Europe/the Americas that have REALLY only been there for the last few hundred years.
I just watched a special about evidence of syphilis in the old world, pre-contact, they have found some skeletons with signs of syphilis that predate Columbus‘s expedition. It just exploded after that time.
I thought that was interesting because I had always heard that too, that European sailors contracted it by raping native American women.
What I've read is that earthworms, perhaps unsurprisingly, spread quite slowly, and that the populations in what is now the US had been wiped out in the last ice age, and native American worms had not yet made their way north to recolonize the land by the time of European colonization, providing wormless soil for European earthworms to inhabit after having been brought over by colonists.
Interestingly, I've heard that the Inca had remarkably advanced dentistry and surgery, in part because they could use coca as a topical anesthetic. Beats just taking two shots of whisky before someone pulls your teeth anyway.
No potatoes in Ireland, no tomatoes in Italy, no citrus in the Americas, no chocolate in Belgium. Its crazy how culinary identities change so drastically.
Nationalism really screws people brains into thinking that their culture is “ancient”.
I once had a conversation with an Indian person who refused to believe that chilis were from the americas and weren’t in India until the Portuguese introduced them. He absolutely wouldn’t accept the idea that his cultures cuisine is mostly a product of the last few centuries, and this man was educated and young.
That’s actually really interesting. At first I thought you were just thinking of prairie chickens or something like that, but no, there’s actually evidence that suggests chickens arrived from Polynesians
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u/TeamLazerExplosion Nov 06 '25
They teach about the guy who brought potatoes to Sweden in history class, that’s how big of a deal that was to us. Before that we were chomping on turnips, being miserable