olmec

There's a fragment of an Olmec or Epi-Olmec stele with a date in the Long Count that, by Maya reckoning, would be in 36 BC.

The Olmec are an interesting case here, too - beautiful, just stunning sculptural works, going back to ~2000-1500BC.

They were eaten by the Aztec and Maya civilizations and previously as well by the Olmec and Toltec.

They have determined the full inscription, calculated the Olmec date, and correlated it to our Gregorian reckoning.

Seems to have been going on during the olmec period too which would indicate at least around 3000 years of play...

I am pretty sure it was already like that in the trobadors days, antic Greece or Olmec civilization.

I don't know enough about Olmec / Mexican geography / development to speak to that.

Egyptians and Mayans and Olmec and so many other cultures have left fingerprints of their engineering prowess.

This may not be a recipe for successful TV, but I would love to watch a TV show about the Maya or the Olmec or the Inca (or really any of the pre-Colombian indigenous people of the Americas).

While they weren't the builders of of fine stonework and megalithic structures like the Olmec (that we know of), there were certainly civilizations and cities before humans suddenly started building the massive pyramids and cities we have uncovered so far.

Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Indus valley, and Ancient China are believed to be the earliest in the Old World,[1][2] while the Caral-Supe civilization of coastal Peru and the Olmec civilization of Mexico are believed to be the earliest in the New World.

There was an attempt at deciphering it published just earlier this year [2] There are a few fragments of glyphs associated with the Olmec [3] which some think bear a resemblance to elements of the Isthmian script and the Mayan script and also the Teotihuacan angry head script.

The Maya though absolutely had "full writing" at least during the classical phase around 200 - 800 AD, and their writing probably derived from the older Olmec system.

All cultural diffusion models assuming external impulses in the creation of Caral / Olmec civilizations are ruled out" Writing, Metallurgy, Weaving, Pyramids, … all co-evolution?

> Madden left legal practice in 2017 and started independent research on the Olmec civilization, an early Mesoamerican population, before he began a master’s program in archaeology — his “original love” — in 2022.

Certainly, that is a common custom when erecting a monument, but what if Olmec logic said "let us commemorate this auspicious event that occurred 300 years ago!" or "Let us anticipate the far future in 5,000 years from now!" for example.

Olmec cultural elements seem to have worked their way into all the cultures of those who came after.

Prewriting culture is still quite fascinating and complex (ex: Homer or Olmec/Maya art) but it does seem to be stuck at a certain level.

This is the first Mayan (Olmec) long-count recorded containing a zero, although long-counts showing a clear positional number system were recorded in the first century BC.