Aztec drawings of smallpox victims.

Teosinte (on the left) was the inedible native grass which the people of central Mexico successfully bioengineered into edible primitive maize (on the right), one of the ancient world's greatest technological accomplishments.

Vincent Van Gogh intended his painting The Potato Eaters as a tribute to Dutch peasants, saying, "It speaks of manual labor, of how they have honestly earned their food." The food they honestly earned was the potato—native to South America—which provided the cheap calories needed to sustain Europe's working class for centuries.

Smallpox, the greatest conquistador of all.

Pangaea, the original supercontinent. 180 million years ago, the Americas began drifting away, beginning a process of divergent evolution that would only be reversed through the intervention of humans after 1492.

Hernán Cortés, conqueror of the Aztec.

A 16th-century drawing by half-Spanish, half-Native American historian Waman Puma captured the violence of the Spanish conquest of the Inca.