Two Worlds Meet: Columbus Reaches the Americas
1492 · event
At two in the morning on 12 October 1492, a lookout named Rodrigo de Triana shouted "Tierra!", and two halves of humanity, separated for fifteen thousand years, were about to meet. Columbus believed until his death that he had reached Asia; he had, in fact, stitched the planet together.
What followed was the greatest exchange in history, and the most devastating. Potatoes, tomatoes and maize crossed east; horses, wheat and coffee crossed west; and with them travelled diseases that killed up to 90 % of the peoples who had discovered these continents first, millennia before.
October 12th is celebrated, mourned and argued over across the world, precisely because no single day changed the lives of more human beings, on every continent, forever.