New World
Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, an Italian chronicler at the service of Spain, doubted Christopher Columbus's claims to have reached East Asia ("the Indies"),[citation needed] and consequently came up with alternative names to refer to them.
[9] In Columbus's 1499 letter to the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, reporting the results of his third voyage, he relates how the massive waters of South America's Orinoco delta rushing into the Gulf of Paria implied that a previously unknown continent must lie behind it.
Vespucci's letter contains the first explicit articulation in print of the hypothesis that the lands discovered by European navigators to the west were not the edges of Asia, as asserted by Christopher Columbus, but rather an entirely different continent that represented a "New World".
[3] According to Mundus Novus, Vespucci realized that he was in a "New World" on 17 August 1501[14] as he arrived in Brazil and compared the nature and people of the place with what Portuguese sailors told him about Asia.
For the opinion of the ancients was, that the greater part of the world beyond the equinoctial line to the south was not land, but only sea, which they have called the Atlantic; and even if they have affirmed that any continent is there, they have given many reasons for denying it is inhabited.
Out of uncertainty, they depicted a finger of the Asian land mass stretching across the top to the eastern edge of the map, suggesting it carried over into the western hemisphere.
[26] The Waldseemüller map of 1507, which accompanied the famous Cosmographiae Introductio volume, which includes reprints of Vespucci's letters, comes closest to modernity by placing a completely open sea, with no stretching land fingers, between Asia on the eastern side and the New World.
[26] The western coast of the New World, including the Pacific Ocean, was discovered in 1513 by Vasco Núñez de Balboa, twenty years after Columbus' initial voyage.
It was a few more years before the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan's between 1519 and 1522 determined that the Pacific Ocean definitely formed a single large body of water that separates Asia from the Americas.
But some European maps of the 16th century, including the 1533 Johannes Schöner globe, still continued to depict North America as connected by a land bridge to Asia.
[26] In 1524, the term "New World" was used by Giovanni da Verrazzano in a record of his voyage that year along the Atlantic coast of North America in what is present-day Canada and the United States.
Asia, Africa, and Europe share a common agricultural history stemming from the Neolithic Revolution, and the same domesticated plants and animals spread through these three continents thousands of years ago, making them largely indistinct and useful to classify together as "Old World".
Common Old World crops, e.g., barley, lentils, oats, peas, rye, wheat, and domesticated animals, e.g., cattle, chickens, goats, horses, pigs, sheep, did not exist in the Americas until they were introduced by post-Columbian contact in the 1490s.
Agriculturalists in the Andean region of South America brought forth the cassava, peanut, potato, quinoa and domesticated animals like the alpaca, guinea pig and llama.
There are rare instances of overlap, e.g., the calabash (bottle-gourd), cotton, and yam are believed to have been domesticated separately in both the Old and New World, or their early forms possibly brought along by Paleo-Indians from Asia during the last glacial period.
