The Marinheiros Taught their apprentices how to cross the oceans, and the latter did so, taking large numbers of people with them. Then the passengers, landsmen and women, had to make homelands of their new lands. The task was not beyond the range of their capabilities – they could have managed, given enough time – but it was beyond the range of their preferences. They were Europeans, not Americans or Australasians, and would never have adapted voluntarily to the new lands in their pristine condition. The migrant Europeans could reach and even conquer, but not make colonies of settlement of these pieces of alien earth until they became a good deal more like Europe than they were when the marinheiros first saw them. Fortunately for the Europeans, their domesticated and lithely adaptable animals were very effective at initiating that change.

The prospective European colonists were livestock people, as their ancestors had been for millennia. The founders of the Neo-Europes were descendants, culturally and often genetically, of the Indo-Europeans, a west central Eurasian people who spoke the ancestral language of most of the tongues of Europe (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian, etc.), a people who were practicing mixed farming, with heavy emphasis on herding, 4,500 years before Columbus. The Europeans who founded the first transoceanic empires were also mixed farmers and pastoralists (they would have understood the Indo-Europeans' way of life more readily than our own), and the success of their animals was, generally speaking, their success.

The Europeans brought with them crop plants, which gave them a very important advantage over the Australian Aborigines, none of whom farmed, and who were slow to take it up. But the Amerindians possessed a number of productive, nourishing plants whose value the invaders quickly acknowledged by cultivating themselves. Cassava is one of the staples of Euroamericans in the tropics, especially in Brazil, and maize is a standard food of Euroamericans nearly everywhere, as it was of Australian colonists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.