600 years ago,
men from Europe set out in wooden ships
and ushered in the Age of Discovery.
Ruthless, driven men like Christopher Columbus,
the conquistadors,
and those who followed in their bloody wake.
They conquered a new world and connected the planet.
You may think it's the story of greed on a global scale.
You may think you know what happened,
but there's a deeper history.
The voyages of Columbus and the Age of Discovery
have roots in the depths of time,
in a land bridge that populated two continents,
in tectonic plates that tore North and South America
from Afro-Eurasia and created two huge world zones,
and in precious metals forged in the heat of a dying star.
Links in the chain of events of deep time history.
I'm Jonathan Markley.
When I was trained as an historian,
we were taught to think of history
as just the story of humankind,
but if you think about it,
there's much more to the story.
We should trace our history into deep time,
to the formation of our planet, our solar system,
even the universe itself.
In this series, we're taking a new look
at important eras in human history
by flashing back at key moments
to show how events from deep in time,
exploding stars, the clash of continents,
secretly shaped the stories we thought we knew.
By revealing the surprising links
between human history and the deep past,
we'll show how our civilization and innovations,
our voyages and battles
are driven not only by the decisions we make
but by physics, geology,
biology, chemistry,
by forces that can be too small to see
or so far back in time
that the only way to understand their influence
is to think in a whole new way.
We live in a connected world,
exchanging information at the speed of light
across oceans and continents.
Everybody knows that.
What you might not realize is that long before humanity,
the whole world was literally connected.
The Earth never stays still.
More than a dozen tectonic plates
keep the surface in constant motion.
1.1 billion years ago,
all the Earth's surface is connected
in the supercontinent Rodinia.
Over the next 10 million centuries,
the planet's jigsaw pieces move apart
and reform into new supercontinents.
First, Pannotia.
After that breaks up, a supercontinent Pangaea,
whose destruction will give birth
to the Age of Discovery.
Because some 200 million years ago,
plate tectonics begin to tear Pangaea apart.
Over tens of millions of years,
Europe breaks away from northern Africa.
The eastern half of Africa is torn away
to form South America.
In another quarter billion years,
these continental jigsaw pieces
will once again form a single land mass,
but for now, the world is segregated
into two major and very different zones.
In one world zone, Afro-Eurasia,
the linked continents of Africa, Europe, and Asia.
57% of the land mass of the world,
with more people,
more animals,
and more plants than anywhere else on Earth.
This is the zone where civilization first appears.
In the other zone, North and South America,
home to younger civilizations.
In the late 15th century,
at the time of Christopher Columbus,
these two massive world zones exist
in complete isolation from each other.
People living with no idea that each other even existed.
You might as well have been living on different planets
at that stage.
So, deep time forces have set the stage
for the voyages of discovery.
Two isolated world zones,
separated by vast oceans,
one of which is about to be crossed.
The launchpad for this crossing is
the Port of Palos, Spain, August 3rd, 1492.
An Italian mariner named Christopher Columbus
is about to set sail.
His plan, find a new trade route to China.
Columbus has no idea
that because of Earth's geology and geography,
his plan is going to utterly fail
or how that epic failure
will make his voyage one of the most influential expeditions
in the history of humankind.
What's driving Columbus' journey into the unknown?
What does he hope to get once he arrives in China?
Believe it or not, an insecticide.
You heard right, an insecticide.
It all starts about 150 million years ago
with the evolution of this plant,
known as Piper nigrum.
It first grew in the mountains of India,
where there are a lot of pests,
and to survive, a plant needs to defend itself.
So, Piper nigrum evolved a special molecule to do just that,
a combination of the common elements
carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen.
The molecule is called piperine.
It's lethal to bugs, but it doesn't kill us.
We're too big.
It just gives us a bit of a spicy kick.
You eat it all the time.
It's better known as black pepper,
and in 1492,
wealthy Europeans can't get enough of the stuff.
Black pepper was the most valuable product out there.
But because of the forces of deep time,
black pepper isn't easy for the European elite to get.
Stand outside on a moonlit night and look up.
What could the moon possibly have to do
with where pepper grows?
To find out, we need to turn back the clock
to when there was no moon.
4.5 billion years ago, there's no moon in the sky
and the Earth is still forming.
Then... We think that an object,
perhaps an asteroid roughly the size of Mars,
plowed into the Earth.
The material that got splattered off Earth
and the impacting object
initially formed a ring or a disc around Earth,
from which the moon coalesced in less than a century.
The impact that led to the formation of the moon
is also probably the event that caused
Earth's axis to be tilted,
in our case, by 23.5 degrees.
This tilt is key.
It means that the midsection of the planet
gets much more sustained light and heat from the sun.
The tilt of Earth's axis, this 23.5 degree tilt,
is why we have tropical zones on Earth
and then the temperate regions.
After a cosmic collision creates the tropics,
plants evolve to survive there,
and only there in the case of spices like black pepper,
which generally needs to be planted in soil
with a temperature between 75 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit.
So, if you're not living in southeast Asia
and you really want pepper,
you can't just produce it yourself.
You have to buy it in from that area.
Because deep time
has created an uneven distribution of resources,
Humans have to create networks of exchange
to bridge the distance to get what they want.
Before Columbus, how did Europeans get their black pepper?
Let's zoom out for a bigger picture view of the world
as it existed when Columbus was born.
Here's India, at the southeastern end of Eurasia,
the source of black pepper and other spices.
Indian merchants trade these spices
with merchants from this country, China,
a huge land with a temperate climate,
rich soil, and immense natural resources.
For most of human history,
the great Chinese dynasties were the most powerful,
wealthiest states on the planet.
In the early 15th century,
China is rich enough to send huge trading fleets
across the Indian Ocean to East Africa
under the command of the famous admiral Zheng He.
Even when political pressure ends those voyages,
the Chinese continue the centuries-long tradition
of the trade routes, later called Silk Roads.
Merchants carry precious goods, including spices,
across land and sea.
The spices are passed on to merchants
in the Islamic countries
that stretch from northern India to the Middle East,
Turkey, and North Africa.
Finally, merchants from the Italian city-states,
like Venice or Genoa,
acquire the spices from Turkish or Middle Eastern ports
and bring them to customers in Western Europe.
So, that's how spices like black pepper
get to medieval Europe
and why Europeans have to pay through the nose to get them.
Europe doesn't just import spices and luxury goods.
It's imported most of its mathematics
and technology from the East.
1,000 years after the fall of the Roman Empire,
Europe is a ragged collection of competing nation-states.
Put 'em all together, and their population and wealth
can't match China or India.
So, it's a real crisis when the Silk Road
is suddenly shut down and the flow of spices stops
because of the Turkish Sultan Mehmet II.
The sultan has a stranglehold on trade
because of geology and geography.
The prehistoric collision of continents
has created two arms of the Southern Ocean,
the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea,
that jut into the Middle East center,
while the Mediterranean washes its northern shores,
and the Black Sea stretches along Turkey's coast.
So, Turkey is perfectly positioned
to strike at the heart of East/West commerce.
By assaulting Constantinople
and other Christian ports and cities in the region,
the sultan shuts the Silk Road down.
Evidence of what happened still exists
in a certain building in Istanbul.
It has a Greek name, Hagia Sophia, or Holy Wisdom.
Today, it's a museum.
It was originally built as a church,
the most famous Christian shrine of the Byzantine Empire,
when Istanbul was called Constantinople.
But along with the Christian iconography,
there are quotes from the Qur'an.
That's because the church was transformed into a mosque
when the sultan captured it in 1453.
This causes a shock wave across Western Europe,
because Constantinople is essentially the gateway
between Europe and the Orient.
It's the place where spices
and other exotic luxuries from the Orient enter Europe.
But one country in Europe
has already been planning to get around the Silk Road,
a country that was considered insignificant,
even by European standards.
Yet, in the early 1400s,
ground zero for the Age of Discovery is Portugal.
Instead of depending on the Silk Road,
Prince Henry, later called the Navigator,
wants to find a direct sea route to India.
Portugal is a poor country,
but if it takes over the spice trade, it'll be rich.
Let's be frank about this.
The early explorers did not go
into the unknown for their health.
No, they did it for financial gain.
Prince Henry's plan
is to do what no one has ever done:
sail around the southern tip of Africa
and into the Indian Ocean.
But there's a geological reason
that sailing around Africa won't be easy.
Africa's Atlantic coastline has very few
natural harbors or inlets.
So when the Portuguese sail south,
there aren't a lot of safe places to anchor.
There are many, many areas
where it's almost impossible to land
and where prevailing currents and wind patterns
make it very dangerous to try to get in and come out again,
so we imagine these expeditions slowly working
further and further down,
then coming back to Portugal,
accumulating more and more information.
Over the decades, Prince Henry's ships
do find a handful of safe harbors.
They start trading in everything from ivory to slaves.
But the decades pass.
Henry the Navigator dies,
and his successors still haven't made it around Africa.
So far, the geographical barriers imposed by deep time
have been too great.
Then, in 1484,
Christopher Columbus comes to the Portuguese
with a new plan.
Never mind Africa.
Save time and money by sailing over the Atlantic.
They assumed that if you cross this ocean
that we see off our western shores here,
that eventually we'll simply come to East Asia.
Columbus is sure
that if he sails far enough west,
he'll end up in the Far East,
because he's sure that the Earth is round.
But, contrary to myth,
Columbus isn't trying to prove that it's round.
Most educated Europeans know the Earth is a sphere.
The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle
had calculated the roundness of the Earth
2,000 years earlier.
But Columbus and other Europeans have no insight
into a deeper question:
why exactly is the Earth round?
What's the scientific reason that planets like ours
are spherical instead of some other shape?
It's a question that we can answer,
and there's a clue in some recent astronomical photos.
Look at these two objects.
One is a comet visited by a space probe in 2014.
The other is Pluto.
Why does the comet have an irregular shape
while Pluto is a sphere like Earth?
Well, the answer is gravity is attractive,
or, as we tell our students, gravity sucks.
In other words, objects in space
form when gravity pulls cosmic debris together.
The force of gravity always pulls
towards the center of an object.
As you add mass, gravity gets stronger.
You see, gravity sucks evenly,
and that's the reason why the state of lowest energy
is when gravity accumulates all this mass,
smooths out all the imperfections
to create a spherical star or planet.
However, for very small objects like asteroids,
gravity is not strong enough to smooth it out.
In fact, if a body is less than
a roughly 700 miles across,
gravity is not sufficiently strong
to create a round planet.
Which is why Columbus is right.
Nevertheless, the Portuguese pass on his plan.
So, Columbus has to seek out
fresh investors for his project,
which he can do, because one of Europe's greatest weaknesses
turns out to be a secret advantage.
So, remember how Europe was
this squabbling collection of competing states?
Well, think about it from Columbus' point of view.
If the Portuguese say no, he can go to the monarchs
of England, France, or Spain,
and he can say to each one of them,
"If you back me, I will make you the richest ruler
"in all of Europe."
Of course, eventually, the king and queen of Spain
decide to take a gamble.
They give Columbus the funding
for his cross-Atlantic route to China.
On August 3rd, 1492,
three ships set sail across the Atlantic.
Now, from a limited point of view,
you have an Italian commanding a Spanish commercial venture
that's trying to get an economic advantage
over the Portuguese.
But think about the knowledge and the technology
aboard those three ships.
Columbus has studied cartography
from ancient Greece and Rome
that's been preserved by our scholars
and translated back into Latin.
He's using a compass that was invented in China
and transmitted to Europe
over the Middle Eastern trade routes.
From the perspective of deep time history,
Columbus and his men represent the sum total
of all the extraordinary knowledge and innovation
of Afro-Eurasia.
Yet, because they don't know that the surface of the planet
is divided into two major world zones,
they have no idea where they're going.
In spite of that,
because of the shape of the Earth
and geological forces unleashed
tens of millions of years before,
these three ships from Afro-Eurasia find land.
An island in the Bahamas that, to this day,
has not been clearly identified.
It's the 12th of October, 1492.
Columbus gives thanks to God
for what he thinks is a successful business trip.
In fact, he's reversed the tectonic process
and brought Afro-Eurasia and the Americas back together.
The world is reconnected.
Humans rediscover each other, if you like,
and the entire globe becomes a sort of a modern,
metaphorical Pangaea.
Columbus never realizes
that he's reached the outskirts of a world
unknown to Europeans.
He thinks he's somewhere near India,
and he calls the people he encounters Indians.
In fact, these islanders are the Taino.
Like Columbus, they came from Afro-Eurasia.
There was this land bridge during the ice age
that allowed waves of migrants to come
from Asia and populate the Americas.
Within a couple thousand years,
they've made it right down to the
southern tip of South America.
With the winding of the ice age from about 12,000 years ago,
sea levels rise dramatically.
That bridge disappears, and these humans are now cut off,
isolated in the Americas from Afro-Eurasia,
and the memory of this connection is sort of lost.
It won't be until literally 1492
that these vast world zones will be reconnected.
The reconnection is the start
of what will be called the Colombian Exchange,
a vast, ongoing transfer between
the Americas and Afro-Eurasia of cultures,
technologies, and especially living things.
The breakup of the supercontinents
was not just a geologic event.
It was also a biological event.
Now, technologies, plants, animals,
diseases, and people from one land mass or the other
will spread across oceans and around the world.
Phase one of the exchange gets underway
when Columbus returns to Spain in 1493.
He has found no black pepper,
but there are other spices
and a strange leaf the Taino burn that they call tobacco.
This leaf will kill hundreds of millions of people.
Its addictive ingredient, nicotine,
evolved as a natural insecticide,
like the piperine molecule of black pepper.
Even more exciting for the Spanish,
small amounts of gold from streams and riverbeds.
They hope to find a lot more,
and they expect the Taino to get it for them.
As Columbus writes in an official report,
"The people would make good servants,"
and he brings back several of them as slaves.
Phase two of the Colombian Exchange
begins on January 2nd, 1494.
Columbus returns to the Americas with 17 ships,
European livestock like pigs and cattle,
and a small army.
The bloody conquest of the Americas is about to begin.
The conquerors' most terrifying weapon is the horse.
Imagine these early horses being brought over.
Imagine Native American people,
who have never seen this before,
saying, "Wow, look at that."
But this is another story
with a deep time twist,
because horses aren't really an invasive species in America.
In fact, they're completing a 7,000-year round-trip.
The horse, which has proven so
important for human history,
originally evolved in the Americas.
Evolved and then disappeared,
possibly hunted to extinction by the Tainos'
ice age ancestors.
But some horses escaped to safety
over the bridge to Eurasia before the seas rose again.
Those prehistoric horses spread throughout Asia and Europe,
where they were domesticated, bred, and cross-bred.
Now, in 1494, the horse returns to the Americas
as a weapon of conquest.
Horses carry the Spanish, who follow in Columbus' path,
into Central and South America,
where they find a new world of powerful civilizations.
This is Mexico City, the world's 12th largest city,
and the largest Spanish-speaking Metropolis on Earth.
It's a hub of commerce and culture,
but in the middle of the city
is what remains of a great temple.
Mexico City is built directly over the ruins
of another great city, Tenochtitlan,
the urban center of the Aztec empire in the early 1500s.
Five square miles, with a population of 200,000,
four times that of London at the time.
It's not just the Aztecs.
The Americas are home to
other powerful empires and kingdoms
including the Maya and the Incas,
and the Spanish conquistadors
don't have an easy time bringing them down.
At least, not at first.
Case in point, one summer night in 1520.
Hernan Cortes and his men find themselves
hunted and outnumbered,
chased into the side streets of Tenochtitlan,
where the spaces are too narrow
to make use of their horses.
Even the superior technology of guns is of little use
against an endless rain of arrows and spears.
As the Spanish flee with as much gold as they can carry,
they leave behind, without knowing it,
a weapon more powerful than gunpowder, horses, or steel.
Inside one of Cortes' fallen
is a biological time bomb
brought forth from deep time.
Months later,
when the Spanish and anti-Aztec allies
return to Tenochtitlan,
they find the city in disarray
and the streets littered with the dead.
Smallpox is the beginning of the end of the Aztec empire.
The disease spreads throughout Central and South America.
The result is often catastrophic.
But why are the European diseases
like smallpox and measles so instantly deadly
to the peoples of 16th century America?
In a way, it goes back to the horse.
Horses, and other large mammals,
were never domesticated in North or South America,
because by the time the descendants
of Asian hunters settle down
and develop civilization in the Americas,
most large mammals had died out.
Look at this farm on the other side of the Pacific.
For thousands of years, people all over Afro-Eurasia
lived with their domesticated animals,
animals that often carried pathogens inside them.
Over tens of centuries,
these diseases kill hundreds of millions,
but over the centuries, Afro-Eurasians develop
some limited immunity.
For the people of the Americas,
immunity consists of two oceans.
Early migrants to the Americas
found themselves then sealed off in this huge world zone,
and the disease of Afro-Eurasia
were in no way able to make their way into the Americas.
But when people cross the water,
so do their pathogens.
In just over a century after Columbus,
between 50 and 95%
of the Americas' native population dies.
Some groups have descendants in the 21st century.
Others die out completely.
Remember, European states that are tiny in comparison
to these great imperial states of the Aztecs and the Inca.
But because the Europeans have got guns,
and they've got steel, and they've got diseases,
they're quickly able to conquer
these very impression civilizations
and the cultures of North America, as well,
and turn these into great areas of
resource acquisition for Europe.
Resources that Europe will then use
to finance its conquest of the rest of the world.
Over the next 400 years,
the Americas are utterly transformed
by new, invasive species from Europe and Asia.
From cattle and pigs
to rats and earthworms,
from apples and oranges and Midwest wheat
to the bluegrass of Kentucky.
There was a similar trade the other way,
from the Americas to Western Europe,
so what we see is a huge export
of crops and livestock from all corners of the world
to all corners of the world,
thus radically transforming the ecology
of the entire planet.
That's because
although the people of the Americas
lacked large, domestic animals,
they had bred more than half of all humanity's usable plants
including tomatoes, squash, beans, peppers,
chocolate, yams, avocados, peanuts, the potato,
and a weed that became one of the world's
most astonishing examples of genetic modification.
What was growing successfully in the wild
in the Americas was a plant called teosinte,
a small, weedy sort of grass
that it took many, many hundreds of generations
of careful, selective breeding of teosinte
before you could start to turn it into a crop
that could feed large numbers of people.
You had to essentially change the DNA of this thing
so that it would produce a lot larger heads.
One ear of teosinte is about the size of a finger
with five to 12 really hard kernels.
It's not much to look at, but 10,000 years ago,
farmers in Mexico began planting and breeding it.
They saw some teosinte ears were a little bigger.
Some kernels might be slightly softer,
and they planted those.
Over thousands of years of selective breeding,
the farmers of Mexico created, and that's the word,
they created what we recognize as modern corn.
Corn is a human invention.
Initially, it probably gets imported into Europe
as a novelty item, but quickly people realize
that this is a really useful crop.
It turns out that while the Earth
only has a few places that can grow spices,
it has many areas where corn can grow,
places too dry for rice, too wet for wheat.
It grows well in a wide range of conditions.
It's relatively pest tolerant,
it's relatively drought resistant,
and it produces a large amount of carbohydrate,
and so it quickly spreads across Europe and into Africa
and today is the basis of both
Europe's and Africa's food system.
In the modern day, this has revolutionized agriculture
across the world, and especially in places
like the American Midwest or in China,
where almost all of the corn that is being produced today
ends up going into the belly of an animal
that we then use for something else, largely for protein.
While corn is a New World crop
that helps transform the Old World,
an Old World crop turns out to be the foundation
of an empire in the New World.
When the conquistadors first arrived in the Americas,
they realized they were in a very conducive environment
for growing certain crop species
for which there is an enormous demand back in Eurasia.
Chief amongst these was sugar.
Sugar was the preferred drug of many, many Europeans.
Humans have a fundamental
deep time link with sugar.
Because it's how we use the power of the sun.
Through photosynthesis, plant cells use water
and carbon dioxide to turn solar energy into oxygen
and sugar molecules.
Simple sugar molecules are the basis for glucose,
which provides energy for living cells.
So, we've evolved a sweet tooth,
chemical receptors that make us want this energy source
that we need.
An early Homo sapien
that had a strong motivation for sugar
might have been healthier, might have been fatter,
might have survived the winter better
and gone on to have more children.
Over time, this sort of evolutionary process
would have bred a craving for sugar in us
that we have still today.
Sugar plantations spring up in areas
where there's no gold to steal:
parts of Brazil, the islands of Jamaica,
Barbados, and elsewhere.
Through exploration and conquest,
Europeans have now seized something
that the deep time history of the planet
failed to give them:
their own tropics.
At first, these tropical plantations are worked
by enslaved local peoples,
but as we've seen, they start dying out
from European diseases.
So the sugar growers solved their labor shortage
by importing slaves from Africa.
Prince Henry the Navigator had started the slave trade
between Africa and Europe in the 1440s.
Now, it becomes one of the biggest businesses
of the entire Colombian Exchange.
Over the next 350 years,
more than 10 million Africans
will be shipped to the New World
to work the sugar plantations of Brazil and the Caribbean
and then other plantations growing tobacco,
rice, coffee, and cotton to supply the world.
If this looks like the beginning of globalization,
that's because it is,
but the substance that really connects the globe,
linking countries around the world in a network of trade
isn't a tropic plant but a precious metal,
buried deep inside this extinct volcano in Bolivia
known as Potosi.
It's not gold, as you might think,
but silver.
One of the great discoveries that the conquistadors,
the Europeans, make is the availability
of a huge mine of silver at Potosi.
The Europeans are very quick to exploit it.
From the view of deep time history,
the silver didn't really come from Potosi
but from the death of an alien star.
Stars make elements,
the basic substances of the universe,
when nuclear fusion at a star's core
rearranges atomic nuclei
with unimaginable pressure and heat.
Middle-sized stars like our sun
make very simple elements like helium.
Larger stars make heavier elements,
and if they die, they make more.
When a star about 10 times more massive than our sun
uses up its nuclear fuel,
it collapses, and then it blows up
in an explosion 100 million times brighter than the sun,
creating even more elements
and shooting them out into space.
If the star is massive enough,
one of those elements is silver.
More than 4.5 billion years ago,
gravity pulls the silver debris together
into the forming Earth.
You have chemicals which touch other chemicals
and coalesce in different ways.
So, as a consequence, silver was not distributed
evenly across the planet Earth.
Inside the Earth, the silver from space
is melted and then concentrated
in areas of extreme subsurface heat.
In other words, where there's volcanic activity.
So, millions of years ago in Bolivia,
the Earth cracks open and Potosi fills with a metal
that in the 16th century,
the Spanish will do almost anything to get.
When silver was discovered in the New World,
that gave incentive for the conquistadors
to complete the process of conquering the New World.
So, believe it or not, events that took place
maybe five, six billion years ago
affected the history of the Americas
billions of years later.
Gold stolen from the Aztecs and Incas
has been a huge windfall for the Spanish,
but it's silver from Potosi
that creates the first true international economy.
That's because between the 1550s and 1800s,
85% of all the silver in the world,
from the Americas to Afro-Eurasia,
flows from this one mountain,
and most of it flows to one country: China.
That's right, China.
A few years after Columbus landed in the Bahamas,
our old friends, the Portuguese,
finally made it round Africa to India and then China.
Once Portugal opened the door,
other European countries quickly found their own ways
into the Chinese markets.
Spain established trades routes
from their new territories in the Americas,
and by the late 16th century,
they're buying Chinese goods with the first global currency:
the purest silver coins in the world.
Silver from Potosi shipped to the mint in Mexico
to create the silver dollar.
Silver was then turned into coins or ingots.
This was then shipped on Spanish galleons
across the Pacific to the new Spanish colony in Manila,
in the Philippines.
From there, it goes on to China
to pay for the still highly in demand Chinese luxury goods.
This extraordinary creation of a supernova
becomes the key medium of exchange
during this early modern period,
this Age of Discovery, and really marks the beginning
of genuine global commercialization of the planet.
500 years later,
a lot of Potosi silver has run out,
and the Mexican dollar is no longer a world currency.
The effects of the global economy
and the Colombian Exchange are all around us.
Take a look at this very common modern meal.
You could call it the Old World/New World combo.
Look at the burger.
Old World.
The cow was domesticated in the Near East,
then went to Western Europe
and was taken to the Americas.
The wheat in the bun, that was first grown in Mesopotamia.
Lettuce, Egypt.
The onion is Asian.
But the tomato on the burger and in the ketchup
comes from Mexico,
and these french fries, New World potatoes
named for an Old World country.
The soda has sugar,
which was originally from Papua New Guinea
in the South Pacific.
It spread through India to the Middle East,
where Europeans acquired it
and cultivated it in the New World.
Oh.
And here are packets of salt and black pepper.
The precious exotic spice from the east
that jump-started the Age of Discovery,
it comes free with your meal.
So, today, we produce black pepper
on very large plantations at an industrial scale,
and the cost of producing the black pepper
are very, very small, and the cost of shipping this product
on large container vessels is totally insignificant.
More inexpensive food for more people?
That's one of the legacies of the Age of Discovery.
Other parts of that legacy are very dark, indeed.
Violence, racism, slavery, even genocide,
but there's something else to be said
for the Age of Discovery.
It altered forever the way we understood
our place in the universe.
There's a very clear link between
the discoveries of these different regions,
extraordinary land forms, life ways, and so on
and what becomes the great Scientific Revolution,
very much driven by trying to make sense of
these extraordinary discoveries.
Plunder and financial gain,
that's why the early explorers risked their life
to go to the New World.
Eventually, a transformation took place.
More and more adventurers and people who were just curious
began to embark upon these great adventures,
the most famous of them being Charles Darwin.
He was curious.
He was a naturalist.
He wanted to write the history of life on the planet Earth,
and the only way he could do that
was to get on one of these boats
and sail the ocean blue.
So we begin to realize that even though originally
the spirit of exploration was the spirit of
looking for profit and commercial gain,
eventually people went
because they were curious about the world.
It was the Age of Discovery in the truest sense of the word.
In one sense, the Age of Discovery
began with a few ships in the 15th century
setting out for unknown shores,
but in another sense, the Age of Discovery
has roots in the very depths of time.
In a land bridge that populated two continents,
tectonic plates that ripped South America from Africa
and created two huge world zones.
In the molecules that formed after the collision
that made the moon.
And the globe-connecting element
forged in the heat of a dying star.
Links in the chain of events of deep time history.