Crosby begins by pointing out that the populations of what he calls the "Neo-Europes" of temperate zones are primarily composed of
European descendants. He asks why there are such large concentrations of Europeans in these lands which are so distant from Europe. Furthermore, why have these locations been able to routinely produce large food surpluses and why are many of the countries located in these regions able to consistently be among the world's largest exporters of food? Although Europeans as a whole were reluctant to leave the familiarity of their
homelands to start a new life abroad until the early 19th century, the Neo-Europes experienced a great influx of European settlers between 1820 and 1930. According to Crosby, this mass
emigration was caused by conditions within Europe at the time, such as "population explosion and a resulting shortage of cultivable land, national rivalries, persecution of minorities", alongside "the application of steam power to ocean and land travel". Because the Europeans arrived in the Neo-Europes with diseases that were absolutely new to those locations, they had an enormous advantage over the
indigenous peoples and the consequences were overwhelming. By 3,000 years ago, give or take a millennium or so, "superman,* the human of
Old World civilization, had appeared on earth. He was not a figure with bulging muscles, nor necessarily with bulging forehead. He knew how to raise surpluses of food and fiber; he knew how to tame and exploit several species of animals; he knew how to use the wheel to spin out a thread or make a pot or move cumbersome weights; his fields were plagued with thistles and his granaries with rodents; he had sinuses that throbbed in wet weather, a recurring problem with
dysentery, and enervating burden of worms, an impressive assortment of genetic and acquired adaptations to diseases anciently
endemic to Old World civilizations, and an
immune system of such experience and sophistication as to make him the template for all the humans who would be tempted or obliged to follow the path he pioneered some 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. ==Legacy==