CAT 2024 Para Completion — Previous Year Question

There is a sentence that is missing in the paragraph below. Look at the paragraph and decide where (option $1,2,3$, or 4 ) the following sentence would best fit.

Sentence: [T]he Europeans did not invent globalization.

Paragraph: The first phase of globalization occurred long before the introduction of either steam or electric power...Chinese consumers at all social levels consumed vast quantities of spices, fragrant woods and unusual plants. The peoples of Southeast Asia who lived in forests gave up their traditional livelihoods and completely reoriented their economies to supply Chinese consumers _ (1) _These exchanges of the year 1000 opened some of the routes through which goods and peoples continued to travel after Columbus traversed the mid- Atlantic. _ (2) _ Yet the world of 1000 differed from that of 1492 in important ways....the travellers who encountered one another in the year 1000 were much closer technologically. _ (3) _They changed and augmented what was already there since 1000. _ (4) _ If globalization hadn't yet begun, Europeans wouldn't have been able to penetrate the markets in so many places as quickly as they did after 1492.