Mesoamericans are people who lived in the civilizations that arose in roughly a 400,000-square-mile (1.04 million-square-kilometer) area in the northern part of Central America. Mesoamerican civilizations spanned an area that included the present-day countries of Mexico (mainly in its southern and central parts), Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Belize. Some experts believe at one time or another in prehistory, some thirty civilizations rose and fell in Mesoamerica. Each one had its own distinct culture, but all shared in many Mesoamerican traditions.

Mesoamerica is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean on the east and the Pacific Ocean on the west. Its climate and geography are very diverse. The weather is warm and dry on the plains along the majority of both coasts. On a large part of the eastern coast, however, heavy rainfall creates dense tropical jungles. Two large mountain ranges run down the length of the area--the eastern and western Sierra Madre mountains. Between the two mountain ranges lie three plateaus with fertile valleys running in between.

In one of these plateaus is the Valley of Mexico, the site of modern Mexico City and a major center of Mesoamerican civilizations in former times. In the Valley of Mexico, at an altitude of nearly 7,500 feet (2,286 meters), the climate is generally pleasant and dry except for a few rainy months in the summer. At the time of the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the early 1500s, it is estimated that about 40 percent of the Mesoamerican population lived in the Valley of Mexico.

At the time the first immigrants arrived in Mesoamerica, the climate was very different than today, with heavy rainfall in the Valley of Mexico that created broad, deep lakes and green forests. Ice age mammals such as the wooly mammoth and the horse (which would later become extinct; horses would only reappear in the Americas when the Spanish brought them) roamed the valleys and plateaus of Mesoamerica in large numbers for thousands of years.

The earliest peoples were hunters of big game, who also gathered plants and hunted rodents, snails, and mussels. Most early Mesoamericans lived in small, nomadic family groups. They set up camps and moved from season to season, unable to find enough food in one place to remain for more than a few months. They usually set up portable, temporary shelters or lived in caves and rock shelters. Their belongings consisted of things they could carry as they searched for food.

In Mesoamerica, unlike the Andes, few animals were raised for food. Dogs and turkeys were about the only meat regularly eaten. Meat was much less necessary in Mesoamerica by about 4000 B.C.E. because people had cultivated maize, a type of corn, and bean crops. These crops provided most of the nutrients the early settlers needed. During the first era of farming, most Mesoamericans remained partially nomadic, leaving their crops for long periods of hunting and only returning in the spring and summer months.

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