Print Friendly, PDF & Email
A rubber ball made by the Olmec people (about 1000 BC)

A rubber ball made by the Olmec people (about 1000 BC)

Invention of rubber

With different natural resources available to them, the people of South America and Central America invented different things than the people of EuropeAsia, or Africa did.

Early African science
South America articles
Central America articles

One early invention was rubber. The Olmec people invented rubber (in fact the word “Olmec” means “rubber people” in the Aztec language, Nahuatl).

More about rubber
Who were the Olmec?

The Olmec began to make rubber about 1600 BC, even before they had formed their first state government. People got latex from the sap of a tree that grew in their area, and they mixed it with the juice of a local vine to make rubber. One thing that they used this rubber for was to make rubber balls for a popular ball game.

Invention of chewing gum

Maya people, about 500 AD, also used another kind of sticky sap called chicle as chewing gum. The name Chicklets for one brand of American chewing gum comes from the word chicle.

More about chewing gum
History of coca leaves
More about tobacco

South American doctors also figured out how to use coca leaves as a powerful pain-killer. They used tobacco to cure headaches and to make people vomit up poisons, and as a kind of toothpaste. Arawak people invented the hammock, which may originally have been a fishing net hung up on hooks.

Parchment and paper

Agave paper made by Aztec people

Agave paper made by Aztec people

But the people of Central America also invented some of the same things that people in Asia invented. Like people in China and West Asia, Central Americans invented parchment (they used deerskin) and agave paper made from beaten fibers from a kind of fig tree.

More about parchment
And about paper

The use of zero

The Olmec also seem to have used zero as a place marker for numbers, perhaps as early as 400 BC. This would be earlier than the first use of zero in India. But the Indian mathematicians didn’t learn about zero from the Olmec.

Indian use of zero
Eclipse of the sun
Eclipse of the moon
History of astronomy

Some time before 1100 AD, also, Mayan astronomers figured out the minimum number of days between eclipses of the sun and eclipses of the moon, but the Mayans couldn’t predict exactly when eclipses would happen. And they probably didn’t understand why eclipses happened. They didn’t know that the moon went around the earth, or that the earth went around the sun.

Learn by doing: chew some gum with chicle in it, and find something made of rubber
More about coca leaves
More about rubber
Native American science

Bibliography and further reading about South and Central American science:

   

More about South and Central America
Quatr.us home