Peru is a South American country that shares borders with Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, and Brazil.

It contains a bit of the Amazon rainforest and river, but also has vast plains and a portion

of the Andes Mountains within its border, in addition to a fairly large coastline.

In the country's largest city, which is also its capital city, Lima, there are just over

8.5 million people, and there are about 33 million people across the entirety of Peru.

Geographically, it's a little smaller than Mongolia and a tiny bit larger than Chad,

which means it's fairly hefty in terms of raw size, but not one of the absolute largest countries

on the planet. It ranks 19th largest, according to United Nations figures, and third largest in South America, after Brazil

and Argentina.

There's archaeological evidence in the shape of hunting tools found in a cave that indicate

tool-making humans were living in what is today Peru at least 11,000 years ago. Evidence of settlements arise

closer to 6,000 BC, and evidence of agricultural cultivation shows up over the course of the next

3,000 years. The groups living in this area at that time seem to have primarily produced early

corn and cotton and to have

domesticated ancestral versions of the modern llama, alpaca, and guinea pig.

Larger cities began to pop up in the area around 2,500 BC and some very sophisticated

ceramics, textiles, sculptures, canals, and even an observatory seem to have been

produced around that same time. Though some of these discoveries are quite recent, and the dates

are still a bit uncertain as a consequence of that recency. For a few thousand years,

dozens of small to medium-sized civilizations developed in this region, mostly along the coasts and in the Andean Mountains. But then in the centuries leading up to 700 BC, there's evidence that a recurring series of El Nino catalyzed floods and droughts, El Nino being a

natural climate system that shifts weather patterns in some regions from time to time,

and those floods and droughts killed off many of the coastal and lower-lying civilizations,

...