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Was the Mayan Empire the most advanced early civilization in the Americas?

The Mayan Empire is considered somewhat more advanced than other early civilizations in the Americas, primarily because it developed five hundred years before such cultures as the Inca and Aztec. The Maya were an agricultural people who settled in southern Mexico and in Central America around 1500 to 1000 B.C. Their vast territory covered the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, Belize, much of Guatemala, and parts of Honduras and El Salvador. The Maya developed a writing system, possibly the first in the Western Hemisphere, which they used to record time and astronomical events as well as their history and religion. They also created an advanced form of mathematics and a 365-day calendar that may have been more accurate than the calendar in use today. At its peak, the Mayan population numbered around 14,000,000.

Mayan history...

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