ABSTRACT
The people of the New World, the Americas, had been much more isolated. Although in many ways human development was parallel in the two regions (Native America and Arctic), in many other respects the Americas took different paths in both biological development and human social development. The rulers of urban societies came from royal dynasties that engaged their regions in warfare against smaller weaker regions and sometimes united with other city-states in larger confederations, gaining control over larger empires. Mesoamericans, including the Nahua, Maya, Zapotec, and Olmec, did have a writing tradition of over 2,000 years duration in 1492; they used a variety of scripts with pictographic and phonetic characters on paper and stone. The Andes region governed by the Inca dynasty is less well understood than Mesoamerica, in part because the society was in such disarray when European observers arrived, and because of the lack of sources that describe preconquest Quechua society.
