The early peoples of Middle America developed their great civilizations completely uninfluenced by the rest of the world. They constructed mighty buildings like the Temple pyramids in Yucatan without any tools, wheels, or animal transport. Their developments in the sciences is also remarkable.
The Olmec culture from 1200 BC was the earliest great Mesoamerican civilization. It came to an end 600-400 BC, but their influence has survived.
Jaguar worship was common to many Mesoamerican civilizations. So devoted were the Olmecs that they reshaped their own skulls in imitation of the jaguar's, binding children's heads while the bones were still soft to achieve the desired flattened shape. (this ritual of elongating the skulls was prevalent in this and other cultures, but we find that it does not account for the very elongated skulls which have more bone mass than the ones referred to here. It is possible that it was not the jaguar whose head was being imitated, but some other entity whose power the people held in awe and wished to duplicate in so doing.)
By 300 AD, the Mayans had also developed into a strong society in the Yucatan area. For them, rituals required precise timing, which is one of the reasons for their accurate computations. (their calendar calculations were accurate to one-one thousandth of a day.)
