Researchers Find Ancient Mayan Megalopolis in Guatemalan Jungle
A new discovery has uncovered an ancient Mayan megalopolis previously buried under thick jungle in northern Guatemala. Using LiDAR technology to digitally remove the tree canopy, scientists uncovered thousands of ruins that belonged to the ancient civilization, proving it was much more advanced than previously thought.
In a recent report by National Geographic, a team of scientists used a technology called LiDAR to scan 800 square miles of jungle. LiDAR, an acronym for light detection and ranging, bounces lasers off physical surfaces and measures their return times in order to create a topographical 3-D survey.
This technology lets scientists remove certain features that may be obstructing their view from above, allowing them to see features that may have been covered by brush or were buried in the jungle. Some have compared this to the recent technology of augmented reality.
nationalgeographic.com
The team found roughly 60,000 houses and palaces, connected by elevated highways and an intricate infrastructure. Carefully planned irrigation and aqueducts were also found, proving that our preconceived notions of ancient Mayan technology had underestimated how advanced they truly were.
According to Marcello Canuto, an archeologist from Tulane University who worked on the project, “This was a civilization that was literally moving mountains.”
Canuto said this will change our perception of how major civilizations once formed. In the past, it was thought that the tropics were a place where ancient civilizations couldn’t flourish, but now he says he thinks they may have been the epicenter from which they spread.
The Mayan civilization was originally believed to be home to around 5 million citizens, covering an area roughly twice the size of medieval England. But this discovery shows that the civilization’s population was likely two or three times larger than previously imagined.
In videos posted by National Geographic, researcher Albert Lin can be seen trekking through the jungle, using an app on a tablet to see LiDAR imaging of ruins right in front of him that he otherwise would have walked past.
The team worked in conjunction with the PACUNAM foundation, a conservational group that works to restore and protect Mayan environmental and cultural heritages in Guatemala.
One of the finds that the team made was of a large pyramid in the center of the famous, ancient Mayan city of Tikal. Their discoveries have already revealed new characteristics about the civilization, such as its extensive defenses and barricades, implying the frequency of large-scale wars.
The team has only mapped about a tenth of what the LiDAR data has uncovered, leading them to believe it may take decades to fully examine all of their new discoveries. It seems we will learn much more about this ancient culture than we previously imagined, changing archeological paradigms of what was once believed to be a more primitive society.
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Decoding the Actual Age of the Great Sphinx
The Great Sphinx of Giza is widely believed to be around 4,500 years old, constructed during the reign of Pharaoh Khafre around 2500 BCE. But some researchers argue it could be far older, even 10,000 to 12,000 years old, based on geological signs of water erosion and other conflicting evidence. This ongoing debate challenges the accepted history of Egypt and the origins of human civilization.
Posing as a sentinel on the Giza plateau is the weathered and colossal figure that stands 66 feet above the desert sand, the Great Sphinx, a limestone sculpture with the head of a lion and the body of a human. While we now know much about the history and mythology of the ancient Egyptians, the mystery of the Sphinx has yet to be truly unraveled.
An ongoing battle between mainstream Egyptologists and a more recent wave of independent thinkers debates the age of the Sphinx by thousands of years. The latter insists the imposing limestone statue is much older than mainstream archaeologists, and Egyptologists claim it to be.
Mainstream archaeologists determined the Sphinx to have been built between 2558 and 2532 BCE. But in 1992, John Anthony West rocked the scientific community with his claim that the Sphinx was actually carved 10,000 years earlier before Egypt was a desert. West and others argued that academia had overlooked an important detail—the body of the sculpture bore distinct markings of water erosion.
After his assessment of the Sphinx’s age, West found fellow scientists who shared his observation about uncovering an entirely different history than was commonly accepted. West’s search led him to Robert Schoch, a geology professor at Boston University, willing to pursue an open-minded, out-of-the-box investigation into the origins not only of the Sphinx but the entire region, as well as its implications for the origin of the human species.
In Gaia’s original series, Ancient Civilizations, Schoch explains his first encounter with the figure in 1990, at which time he immediately noticed there was a disconnect between the statue’s academically accepted date of origin and the truth staring him in the face. Upon careful inspection, Schoch realized the Sphinx survived intensely wet weather conditions that stand in stark contrast to the now hyper-arid conditions of the Sahara Desert.
Schoch concluded that academia had determined the Sphinx’s age by overlooking signs of erosion due to heavy rainfall. The deluge that eroded the Sphinx was uncommon to the Egyptian plateau 5,000 years ago, but very common 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. For Schoch, this was an exciting find, but for mainstream science, it was met with derision and denial.
