Category: South America

Central and South America – Age of Discovery
Before the arrival of the Europeans, there were a large number of Indian peoples in Central and South America who, under the influence of very different geographical and climatic conditions, had developed completely different forms of culture.

THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE
The first ancestors of these Indian peoples immigrated from Asia via the Bering Strait around 28,000 to 23,000 years ago during the Ice Age. In the following millennia, they were divided into a large number of partly nomadic, partly settled tribes who trained more than 500 different languages. In some cases there were early forms of intensive, labor-sharing agriculture based on plant cultivation, in some cases the Indian tribes lived as hunters and gatherers until the arrival of the Europeans.

The development of a differentiated, high-yielding agriculture in America was made considerably more difficult by the fact that the entire continent suffered from a serious shortage of organic “raw material” for animal husbandry. While Eurasia was home to 13 of the “classic 14” domesticated herbivorous mammals – including the “big five”, the ancestors of sheep, goats, pigs, cattle and horses – there were practically no candidates for domestication in America except for the llama, albeit from biological ones Grounds never spread beyond the Andean region, and the guinea pig, which was not very productive as a supplier of meat and hide and could hardly be harnessed to a plow. In addition to these two, only three other species have been domesticated throughout America: the dog, the turkey, and the musk duck. For more information about the continent of South America, please check politicsezine.com.