Yes, it did, except for the braindead fools who still chant that mantra about the evil Europeans. What would have happened to the indigenous tribal hunter-gatherers in North America had nobody crossed the ocean? They would have been sacrificed en masse to the never satiated "gods" of Meso, or South America.
What would have happened to them if the 'discovery' was from the west, and done by Chinese, or Japanese coming from mainland East Asia? Tibet tells the story there, they would have been ruthlessly displaced, likely totally exterminated. The same thing would have happened if the 'invaders' from the east were Arab Muslims, who were as likely to do it, in the same timeframe, as the Europeans did. Total extermination would have been their fate, for sitting on resources they could neither utilize, nor defend against a society which had the knowledge to utilize them, and the power to take them.
It was only the Europeans, and Judeo-Christian thought which allowed even a bare-shell semblance of their way of life to continue. Why? Because only that culture had inculcated the reverence for human life necessary to even partially spare "the other"...
the infowarrior
Excellent post. Thank you.