Products such as potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate and tobacco have become part of our daily lives. But only after the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus were these products brought to our regions. After this discovery, the Columbian exchange began: products were transported from the New World to the Old World and vice versa. It must be said that this exchange had a huge impact on the world: without the Colombian exchange the world would have been very different. In his essay, Charles C. Mann (2007) stated, “It is undoubtedly the most important event in the history of life since the death of the dinosaurs.” First, the Columbian exchange radically transformed America's ecological environment. Charles C. Man (2007) explained that due to the success of Rolfe's tobacco plantation in Jamestown, English earthworms had been transported from the Old World to the New World. Since these worms were extinct in the American continent, these insects caused a lot of damage by eating the leaf litter under the trees. When it rained, all the nutrients the trees needed to survive were taken away. As a result, many trees died and the landscape became more open than before. However, worms were not solely responsible for the drastic change in the American landscape. Furthermore, the settlers themselves transformed the original landscape, transporting their domesticated animals, completely unknown to the Native Americans, to the New World. Before the arrival of settlers, the American environment consisted of large tracts of land cleared because the Indians used to burn the brush to keep the land open. When settlers arrived with their livestock, they began building fences to make the area more civilized, however many animals managed to eat the Indian crops. Third, the European bee also had an impact on the
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