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Mesoamerica and its cultural areas. Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area that begins in the southern part of North America and extends to the Pacific coast of Central America, thus comprising the lands of central and southern Mexico, all of Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, and parts of Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.
Andean civilization lacked several characteristics distinguishing it from the pristine civilizations in the Old World and from the Mesoamerican cultures. First, and perhaps most important, Andean civilizations did not have a written language. Instead, their societies used the quipu, a system of knotted and colored strings, to convey information ...
Others were contemporary with this period, and are also known from historical accounts of the time. A few, such as the Olmec, Maya, Mixtec, and Nahua had their own written records. However, most Europeans of the time viewed such texts as heretical and burned most of them. Only a few documents were hidden and thus remain today, leaving modern ...
Some Andean cultures also bred the Chiribaya to herd llamas. The vast majority of indigenous dog breeds in the Americas went extinct, due to being replaced by dogs of European origin. [174] The Fuegian dog was a domesticated variation of the culpeo that was raised by several cultures in Tierra del Fuego, like the Selk'nam and the Yahgan. [175]
Andean civilizations had bronze smelting, discovered by the Moche culture and used by the Calchaquí and Inca; Metallurgy in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica appeared after 600 CE, including alloys of copper; later, bronze techniques were probably imported from South America
One of the most influential civilizations in Mesoamerica was the Olmec civilization, sometimes referred to as the "Mother Culture of Mesoamerica." [ 23 ] The later civilization in Teotihuacan reached its peak around 600 AD when the city possibly became the sixth largest city in the world, [ 23 ] whose cultural and theological systems influenced ...
Schematic illustration of maternal (mtDNA) gene-flow in and out of Beringia, from 25,000 years ago to present. The genetic history of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas is divided into two distinct periods: the initial peopling of the Americas from about 20,000 to 14,000 years ago (20–14 kya), [1] and European contact, after about 500 years ago.
The cultural development of ancient Mesoamerica was generally divided along east and west. "Archaeologists have dated human presence in Mesoamerica to possibly as early as 21,000 BCE" (Jeff Wallenfeldt) [36]. The stable Maya culture was most dominant in the east, especially the Yucatán Peninsula, while in the west more varied developments took ...