The Columbian exchange (this is the correct spelling) transferred a diverse set of crops and livestock animals between the Old and New Worlds. However, I have begun to wonder if there were any crops and animals that were common to both.
Wikipedia provides a wealth of information on the subject of the Columbian exchange, but it only describes what was transferred, with no mention of common crops or livestock to the two regions. Likewise, just Googling anything including the term “Columbian Exchange”, as well as variations like “Columbian Exchange common crops” and even “columbian exchange -maize”, gave me a lot of information on what was exchanged, but very little on things that were not exchanged, and I have found nothing on common crops and livestock animals.
Were there any crops and livestock common to both the Old and New Worlds, or were all crops and livestock novel to the region opposing their region of origin?
Excellent question!
As noted above, both Europeans and Native Americans had domestic dogs before Columbus. But there’s a second species: Chickens! (Maybe).
Let me backtrack here. The chicken you’re familiar with is the domesticated descendant of the south Asian jungle fowl, which was domesticated in India (or possibly Sri Lanka, or possibly southern China) and spread eastward and westward from there until it was well established throughout Eurasia and Northern Africa as a source of eggs, meat, and entertainment (cockfighting has a long history and is one of the main reasons humans kept these birds). When European colonists reached the new world, they brought their chickens with them. New American breeds developed, but all were believed to be descended from European domesticated or feral stock.
Except the Araucana. The Araucana chicken (also known as the Mapuche fowl or the South American rumpless fowl) is a breed of domestic chicken. A very, very weird breed of domestic chicken. When European observers first identified it in the early twentieth century, it was already widespread along the pacific coast of South America. A quick look at an Araucana will tell you it is not a typical barnyard bird. As its name would suggest, it is “rumpless,” which is to say it is missing the last several bones of its tail, leaving it with a small, floppy tail that hangs downward rather than a large, erect one. The araucana also displays prominent ear tufts or “earrings” - plumes of feathers growing out of the ears that give it a very unusual appearance. Most importantly it its history, the Araucana also lays blue or green-shelled eggs, which were a novelty to the european world at the time.
Immediately, the breed attracted attention. Because no European breeds had any of these strange traits, scientists immediately began to speculate how the Araucana might have acquired them. The initial theory was that araucanas were not chickens at all, but rather an indigenous South American fowl domesticated from an extinct wild ancestor. This was quickly disproven, as the araucana can freely crossbreed with European chickens and produce fertile hybrids (which, critically, retain the green egg trait). It was briefly hypothesized that the araucana might be the result of hybridization between Spanish fowl and the native tinamou. This was also a non-starter: the tinamou cannot crossbreed with any known chicken, and is in fact more closely related to ostriches and emus than to other flying birds.
So, we are left with two possible explanations: One, that Spanish birds spread rapidly down the coast of South America, gaining a number of highly unusual adaptations on the way, none of which flowed back up the genetic current. Or Two, that the araucana had reached the new world from an entirely different direction by coming east over the pacific rather than west from the Atlantic.
Chickens (along with dogs and pigs) were the key agricultural species of the various societies of ancient Polynesia. The Polynesians, like the Europeans, were explorers and settlers. But, where the Europeans settled the vast landmass of the Americas, the Polynesians spread out over a huge swath of ocean, bringing domesticated animals to isolated island chains that could be thousands of miles apart. This led to a case study in the founder effect - the process by which geographically isolated animal populations develop unusual specialized traits based on the genetics of the first few individuals. Like Darwin’s famous finches, Polynesian chickens spread out across the islands (with human help) and assumed a vast diversity of unusual genetic traits. The idea that the araucana may be descended from Polynesian stock - either thanks to a precolumbian trade route or a fortunate (for the chickens) shipwreck begins to seem less audacious.
As for hard evidence, there have been studies pulling both ways. A 2007 archeological and genetic study suggests that the people of coastal Chile have been keeping araucanas or birds like them long before the Spanish introduced them, and possibly before Columbus’ voyage, and also tentatively pointed to genetic links between araucanas and pokynesian birds. A later study refuted the 2007 genetic findings, but did not address the archaeological conclusions.
So, what happened to the araucana? It’s still with us today, both as a curiosity and as an agricultural animal. When the broader world learned of the miraculous green eggs, demand for the birds skyrocketed. Pure-bred araucanas suffer from a number of genetic problems that can make them difficult to breed, but American agriculturalists crossed them with existing agricultural strains to produce a hybrid known as the Americauna, which had both the green eggshells of its South American parent, and the hardiness of American birds. Green-shelled eggs really took off when they began to me marketed as an early super food for diabetics. Araucana eggs were found to be unusually high in the chemical inulin, which, in a fit of agricultural dyslexia or shrewd marketing, came to be conflated with insulin, the chemical that diabetes patients cannot naturally produce. Green eggs were marketed as a miracle cure for diabetics. They didn’t work of course, but they are awfully pretty.
Today, you can find araucana (or more often americauna) eggs in many specialty grocery stores. They are, as far as anyone can tell, nutritionally identical to white and brown eggs (the idea that brown eggs are healthier is an invention of marketing too).
Until more archeological and/or genetic evidence is unearthed, the origins of the araucana are likely to remain a mystery. If proven, they will join dogs as the only two domesticated species kept on both of the world’s major inhabited land masses before the Colombian exchange.
There were some crops and animals in common. Dogs and chickens have already been mentioned (and since dogs were kept for food in both the Old World and New World, "livestock" is appropriate). These are the two domestic animal species shared by the pre-Columbian Old and New Worlds. The other shared pre-Columbian domesticated animal, the duck, originated from different genera: the Old World domestic ducks are subspecies of the mallard, Anas platyrhynchos, and the New World domestic duck, the Muscovy duck, Cairina moschata, is a different genus (both are in the same family, Anatidae (ducks)). Other animals were eaten in both New and Old Worlds, but were not domesticated in both (and often, neither). Such animals include bison (the American and European bison are different species, Bison bison and Bison bonasus, respectively), various birds (e.g., puffins) and marine animals.
Two (or maybe 3 or 4) plant species were shared, too: coconuts (Cocos nucifera) and sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas). Coconuts went east across the Pacific, and sweet potatoes went west across the Pacific. Possibly either or both were carried by Polynesians (as suggested for chickens), but there isn't any clear evidence. Sweet potato seeds could have been carried west by birds, and coconuts drift in the ocean by themselves. For coconuts, the distance is more than the usual distance coconuts can drift for and survive, so human agency has been suggested (and, while in principle, a coconut "could be carried by an African swallow" for some distance, the Pacific is still too large).
The other possible shared plant species are taro and kapok. It is known that there was a post-Columbian exchange of taro varieties between the Caribbean and West Africa, with the new foreign varieties grown alongside the old varieties (which provides insurance against pests and diseases) in both places. The history of taro in the New World is poorly known. Taro (Colocasia esculenta, sometimes divided into two species, Colocasia esculenta and Colocasia antiquorum) is a very old Old World domesticate. The history of New World taro is obscured by a similar plant, Xanthosoma sagittifolium and other similar species. which are old South American domesticates - these plants are so similar, that they are often called by the same common names. If the same taro species was not present in both Worlds pre-Columbian, then very similar plants were present. The other possible shared species is kapok (Ceiba pentandra), a large tree used as a source of cotton-like fibre from its pods. Kapok appears to have been present in West Africa before Columbus, and has a long history in the Americas (including being used for textile armour in Maya cultures).
Another shared plant, but with common genera rather than species, is cotton. Two cotton species were domesticated in the Old World, Gossypium arboreum and Gossypium herbaceum, and two in the New World,Gossypium hirsutum and Gossypium barbadense. Today, G. hirsutum dominates commercial production.
Two other plants were shared at the genus level, but not strictly domesticated: pine (genus Pinus, for pine nuts), and brambleberries (blackberries and kin, genus Rubus). A variety of species in both genera were grown and used for food in both the Old World and New World.
Going beyond shared genera, we have groundnuts and beans. The New World peanut, Arachis hypogaea, and the Old World (African) bambara nut, Vigna subterranea, are related, and both grow their nuts underground; the bambara nut with only one seed per pod. As for non-groundnut beans, various species in the genus Phaseolus were domesticated in the New World, and many species in the genus Vigna were domesticated in the Old World. Other bean/pea genera, such as Vicia, Pisum, Lupinus, and Glycine were also domesticated in the Old World, but the Vigna species are more closely related to Phaseolus - some Old World beans currently classified in the genus Vigna were formerly classified as species of Phaseolus, before Phaseolus became restricted by convention to New World beans.
Dogs were present in both the old and the new world for thousands of years.
Here's an older thread that goes into more detail