Charles C. Mann is among the most prominent America authors during the early parts of the 20th century wherein he was most famous for his work: Coming of Age in the Dawnland published in 1941. He presented his argument that the Native Americans lived in a dynamic world because they were already considered as civilised people, even before the Europeans came to the New World.
The central idea of a passage is summing up everything that has been said. You take the valuable information from the passage and put it into a few sentences.