Short answers, pulled from the story.
Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area covering central and southern Mexico, all of Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, western Honduras, and the Greater Nicoya region of Nicaragua and Costa Rica. It is defined as a cultural area by a mosaic of traits shared among its indigenous cultures.
Mesoamerica is one of only six areas in the world where ancient civilization arose independently, and the second in the Americas alongside the Caral-Supe of present-day Peru. It is also one of only five regions where writing developed independently, along with ancient Egypt, India, Sumer, and China.
The German ethnologist Paul Kirchhoff first used the term Mesoamerica, which means "middle America" in Greek. He defined the zone as a cultural area based on interrelated cultural similarities brought about by millennia of regional interaction.
Beginning as early as 7000 BCE, Mesoamerican peoples domesticated cacao, maize, beans, tomato, avocado, vanilla, squash, and chili, along with the turkey and dog. The turkey was domesticated locally around 3500 BCE, and dogs were the primary source of animal protein in ancient Mesoamerica.
Mesoamerican peoples independently invented zero as a positional placeholder, one of only a handful of times in human history. The earliest known Long Count inscriptions using positional notation date to the first century BCE, including Stela 2 at Chiapa de Corzo at 36 BCE and Tres Zapotes Stela C at 32 BCE, and the Maya represented zero with a shell glyph.
The distinct Mesoamerican cultural tradition ended with the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century, with the Aztec Empire conquered between 1519 and 1521. Eurasian diseases such as smallpox and measles caused the deaths of upwards of 90% of the indigenous people, though Maya groups such as the Itza at Tayasal remained independent until 1697.