History of South America
The history of South America is the study of the past, particularly the written record, oral histories, and traditions, passed down from generation to generation on the continent of South America. The continent continues to be home to indigenous peoples, some of whom built high civilizations prior to the arrival of Europeans in the late 1400s and early 1500s. South America has a history that has a wide range of human cultures and forms of civilization. The Caral Supe civilization, also known as the Norte Chico civilization in Peru is the oldest civilization in the Americas and one of the first six independent civilizations in the world; it was contemporaneous with the Egyptian pyramids. It predated the Mesoamerican Olmec by nearly two millennia. Indigenous peoples' thousands of years of independent life were disrupted by European colonization from Spain and Portugal and by demographic collapse. The resulting civilizations, however, were very different from those of their colonizers, both in the mestizos and the indigenous cultures of the continent. Through the trans-Atlantic slave trade, South America (especially Brazil) became the home of millions of people of the African diaspora. The mixing of ethnic groups led to new social structures. The tensions between