Demographic and Environmental History - AP World History: Modern

Sheep were the first animals to be domesticated, over eight thousand years ago, at the same time as the Neolithic Revolution was taking place. They were first domesticated in modern-day Iraq - so the correct answer is the Middle East.

Almost all of the major early civilizations of South America emerged in the Andean foothills. These civilizations include the Moche, the Nazca, the Chavin, and the Inca.

Agriculture allowed people to grow a surplus of food, which allowed them to stay in one place. Previously, humans had to move from place to place as hunter-foragers to sustain a food source.

The first four civilizations all developed in river valleys because water was important for agriculture and transportation. None of the other provided answers are factually correct.

The Anasazi culture emerged in the southwest of the modern-day United States. The Anasazi lived in this part of North America from about 300 - 1300 CE.

Resistance by indigenous groups to the settling of Europeans in the Americas was futile as the Europeans possessed firearms. The Age of Sail was advantageous to Europeans at the expense of indigenous Americans, who were decimated by, among other things, the speed and power of European military might. The Age of Sail was important to European societies because it added to their wealth, by cultivating the natural resources of the Americas, but it did not lead to European peace; rather it became another theater of war in which the Spanish, Dutch, British and French competed.

While numerous factors led to the outbreak of the plague, theories agree that the diseases originated in Asia, not North America. Historians and scientists agree that the plague was transmitted to Europe via both land and sea trade routes, and the poor sanitation standards of European cities caused the plague to be rapidly transmitted among the populace.

The Aztec's had a centralized government with geopolitical boundaries centered on Tenochtitlan (present day Mexico City). All of the other nations listed cannot claim any specific territory as their sovereign land. The Catalans seek sovereignty in Eastern Spain; the Kurds in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey; The Sikhs in Northern India and Pakistan; and the Yoruba in West Africa.

The Ottoman Empire was the single largest country in the European/Middle Eastern spheres of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. This vast empire stretched from Baghdad across the Arabian and Balkan Peninsulas into Northern Africa, where it controlled all the land from Egypt to Algiers. The Ottoman Empire first emerged as a power to be reckoned with in the eleventh century, when various Ottoman tribes left Asia and moved into the Mediterranean and Northern African regions. Soon, the Ottomans began to gain more and more territory, and the Empire’s conquest of the city of Constantinople in 1453 signaled the permanence of their dominance to all the other European states. From that time onward, various European countries struggled against Ottoman incursions (both territorially and economically). At times, the Ottoman Empire seemed unstoppable, especially due to its lucrative control over much of the vast Middle Eastern and Asian trade routes, which provided Europe with much coveted luxury goods, such as silks and spices. But the Ottomans made a dreadful mistake in 1683, when they attempted to conquer the Austrian city of Vienna. Their invasion was a disastrous failure and marked the beginning of the Empire’s long, agonizingly slow decline from power. All throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many European countries, including Russia and Austria, began to chip away at the Ottoman’s sphere of control, challenging them for control of various ports and seeking alternate trade routes, especially in newly-discovered North and South America. The Ottomans’ grip on power began to slowly but steadily slip.

Although the arrival of Europeans led to widespread death and destruction in the Americas, the global population still rose significantly in this time period. This was caused by the exchange of native crops between the Old World and the New World. Crops like potatoes and corn, which were native to the Americas, could be used to sustain the population in unexpected parts of the world -like Ireland or Eastern Europe.

Modern-day New York City was established on the island of Manhattan by Dutch settlers in 1625. It was called New Amsterdam and was the capital of the Dutch North American empire, called New Netherland. It was ceded to the English in 1667 after it had been captured by English forces a few years earlier. The English settlers renamed it New York.

Ferdinand Magellan was a Portuguese explorer who made a famous voyage, on behalf of the Spanish crown, around the tip of South America (through the Strait of Magellan) and across the Pacific Ocean. This voyage was the first to successfully circumnavigate the earth, but, unfortunately for Magellan, he was killed in battle in the Philippines and thus did not complete the circumnavigation personally.

Christopher Columbus’ voyages to the new world were sponsored by the Spanish crown, which at the time was led by Ferdinand and Isabella.

Bartolomeu Dias was a Portuguese explorer who, in 1488, became the first European known to have sailed around the Cape of Good Hope (at the tip of South Africa) and reached the Indian Ocean. His voyage was part of the early era of European exploration and colonialism that established Portugal as a leading maritime empire.

After the arrival of Europeans in the fifteenth century the population of the Americas declined dramatically in the following decades. The Europeans contributed to this widespread death directly by exterminating and enslaving the native population, but the bulk of the damage was done by deadly contagious diseases that the European explorers and settlers brought with them. Diseases like smallpox were not native to the Americas and the local population had no natural resistance to the disease. By most historians’ estimates, within two centuries of the arrival of Europeans the population of the Americas had declined by ninety percent.

The Spanish were the first European settlers to settle in Florida. The Spanish colony of Florida was one of the earliest European colonies in the New World. It was established by Juan Ponce de Leon in 1513.

James Cook, who was born in England and lived from 1728 until 1779, was the first European to reach Australia as well as New Zealand and Hawaii on his ship the HMS Bark Endeavor. He mapped large portions of the Pacific Ocean, including the eastern coastline of Australia and the entirely of the New Zealand coast.

The Holy Roman Empire was dissolved after Napoleon conquered it, and eventually replaced with the German Federation, which became the German Republic in 1918, and was divided into East and West Germany after World War II. The modern country of Germany was finally created with reunification in 1990, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Italy is also a country with a complicated history, and might be a tempting answer for "Holy Roman Empire" due to Rome; however, after the collapse of the Roman Empire many distinct claims to its successor lived on, with the city of Rome, Constantinople in the Ottoman Empire, and the Germanic tribes that had conquered Rome in the Early Middle Ages. The latter is what eventually led to the Holy Roman Empire.

During the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, tens of millions of Europeans migrated from Europe to colonies (and later countries) such as the United States, Brazil, Canada, Australia, and Argentina. The peak of this migration occurred during the mid 19th to early 20th centuries.

Malthus was an ardent student of population trends. He published many studies on how populations affected the economics of a given area or nation. He also looked at the trends of the populations of the world as a whole.