It boggles the mind to think that when the Taino people walked out onto the beaches of San Salvador and looked at Christopher Columbus, they weren’t just looking at men from another country; they were looking across a 15,000-year-old canyon of human separation. Columbus’s men brought weapons, clothes, and concepts forged by thousands of years of European, Asian, and African collision. But they also brought diseases that had never existed in the New World. In this episode, were going to talk about how the geographic isolation that had allowed these two worlds to grow into distinct, beautiful masterpieces was about to become the New World’s undoing.