Early Mesoamerica — The Olmec

Everything we have studied so far, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, China, developed along a rough band of latitude stretching across Eurasia and North Africa. Ideas, crops, technologies, and diseases traveled along that band, accelerating development in ways that compounded over millennia. The peoples of the Eastern Hemisphere were, in a real sense, in conversation with one another.

The Americas had no such conversation. Separated from the Old World by two vast oceans, the peoples of the Western Hemisphere built civilization on their own terms. They had no wheat or barley, so they domesticated maize. No horses or oxen, so they developed human-powered systems of transport. No bronze or iron, so they worked jade, obsidian, and eventually gold. And yet, independently, they arrived at many of the same milestones: monumental architecture, writing, mathematics, astronomy, complex religion, social stratification.

The first great civilization of the Americas emerged not in highlands or desert valleys but in the steaming tropical lowlands of the Gulf Coast of Mexico. They are known as the The earliest major civilization of Mesoamerica, flourishing from roughly 1500 to 400 BCE in the tropical lowlands of south-central Mexico. Often called the "mother culture" of Mesoamerica, the Olmec developed monumental architecture, a writing system, complex religion, and artistic traditions that influenced all subsequent Mesoamerican civilizations..