Sometime before 3500 B.C., something happened in Norte Chico in Peru. This is the site where the oldest traces of ``Genuine civilization" ― pyramids included ― were found in America.
Here, at least 25 large ceremonial and residential sites have so far been found, of which Caral has become the most famous.
Norte Chico, roughly 100 kilometer north of the Peruvian capital Lima, consists of four narrow river valleys, from south to north: Huaura, Supe, Pativilca, and Fortaleza.
The ancient pyramids of Caral predate the Inca civilization by 4,000 years, but were flourishing a century before the pyramids of Gizah. No surprise therefore that they have been identified as the most important archaeological discovery since the discovery of Machu Picchu in 1911.
Caral is located 14 miles inland from Aspero.
Even though Caral was discovered in 1905, it was quickly forgotten as the site rendered no gold or even ceramics.
It required the arrival of an archeologist Ruth Shady Solis in 1994 before a genuine paradigm shift would occur.
She is a member of the Archeological Museum of the National University of San Marcos in Lima. Since 1996, she has cooperated with Jonathan Haas of the American Field Museum.
Together, they have found a 150-acre array of earthworks, which include six large platform mounds, one 20 meters high and more than 100 on a side.
But Solis did not make the same mistake Willey had made: she felt that the ``pyramids'' were just that: they were not natural hills, as some of her predecessor had catalogued the structures of Caral.
Her subsequent research led to the announcement, in the magazine Science on April 27, 2001, of the carbon dating of the site, which revealed that Caral had been founded before 2600 B.C.
The ``impossible' carbon dating results of Aspero now seemed more likely, and Caral had become the oldest city in the ``New'' World, older than the Gizah pyramids.
For an unknown reason, Caral was abandoned rapidly after a period of 500 years (2100 B.C.).
The preferred theory as to why the people migrated is that the region was hit by a drought, forcing the inhabitants to go elsewhere in search of fertile plains.
The fact that the ``Staff God'' is found two millennia later elsewhere in South America shows that these people did not disappear; they merely moved elsewhere, and seem to have built other religious centers on their travels.
Solis came to Caral looking for the fabled mission link of archaeology, a ``mother city.'' Today, she is still trying to convince people that Caral was indeed the oldest urban civilization in the world.
The discovery of Caral challenged accepted beliefs.
``Some historians were not ready to believe that an urban civilization existed in Peru even before the pyramids were built in Egypt,'' she says. ``This place is somewhere between the seat of the gods and the home of man.''