The Olmec

On the humid Gulf coast of Mexico, the Olmec built Mesoamerica's first civilization — planned centers, long-distance trade, and a religion whose jaguar gods and sacred ballgame would echo through the Maya and Aztec a thousand years later. With no contact whatsoever with the Old World, they arrived independently at the same building blocks: cities, monumental art, hierarchy, and eventually writing and a calendar. They are among the clearest proof that civilization's core patterns are not borrowed from a single source but re-invented, again and again, by people facing the same problems.