'Olmec' means 'rubber people', a name given by the Aztecs.
On the Gulf coast, rubber balls for the ritual ballgame were made as early as 1600 BC. What the Olmecs called themselves is unknown.
The events
- Olmec colossal headsc. 1000 BC · San Lorenzo, Mexico. The Olmecs carved giant heads up to 3.4 m tall and weighing from 5 to over 40 tonnes out of basalt boulders. The stone was hauled more than 150 km from the Tuxtla mountains, and each head has its own face and helmet: probably portraits of rulers.
- La Venta, the Olmec capitalc. 900 BC · La Venta, Tabasco (Mexico). After San Lorenzo declined, La Venta, on an island amid marshes near the Gulf of Mexico, became the main Olmec centre around 900–400 BC. Its builders raised a clay pyramid about 30 metres high, set up colossal stone heads and buried mosaic pavements of serpentine. Many of its monuments now stand in a park museum in Villahermosa.
16th century BC · 10th century BC
More amazing facts
- 1700 BC A Babylonian student worked out the square root of two to six decimal places.
- 1600 BC · 2002 The oldest known depiction of the night sky was recovered in a police sting in Basel.
- 1600 BC Rubber balls are at least 3,600 years old. The oldest were found in Mexico in the bog of El Manatí, where around 1600 BC the Olmecs cast offerings to the gods along with wooden busts and stone axes.
- 1600 BC · 360 BC The legend of Atlantis may have grown out of the eruption of Santorini.
- 1479 BC · 1458 BC The female pharaoh Hatshepsut was portrayed as a man, with a male body and male dress.
- 1470 BC · 1450 BC Dingoes reached Australia at about the time Queen Hatshepsut sent her ships to Punt.