Assignment task:
Identify a "negative" example of intensified interaction among different regions: As Eurasian peoples traveled, traded, and interacted over long distances, they also unwittingly spread disease pathogens. Diseases that broke out among previously unexposed populations often caused widespread epidemics, which severely disrupted whole societies. During the fourteenth century bubonic plague erupted in epidemics that ravaged societies throughout most of Asia, Europe, and north Africa. Epidemic plague struck intermittently until the seventeenth century, but by the fifteenth century Chinese and western European societies, in particular, had begun to recover from its effects. About 1300 c.e. a process of global climatic change caused temperatures to decline significantly throughout the world. For more than five hundred years, the earth experienced a little ice age, when temperatures were much cooler than in the era 1000-1300 C.E. Markedly cooler temperatures meant shorter growing seasons, which caused agricultural production to decline in many lands. Across much of Eurasia, the cooler temperatures of the little ice age made it much more difficult to produce enough food for subsistence. That, in turn, led to famine and sometimes even starvation. In some northerly lands, such as Greenland, agriculture ceased to be a practical possibility, forcing Norse settlers to abandon