San Diego Zoo is forced to euthanize a two-day-old male giraffe calf named Masai after officials noticed it.
Meet King Ghidorah! New species of creepy branching worm discovered in Japan is named after Godzilla's.Star of the show! NASA shares stunning footage of powerful solar flare erupting from Earth's sun that was.Meet Shep-en-Isis: Scientists reconstruct the face of a female mummy who died 2,600 years ago, revealing she.They maintain a distinctive set of traditions and beliefs that are the result of the merger of pre-Columbian and post-Conquest ideas and cultures. Today their descendants form sizable populations throughout the Maya area. Maya influence can be detected from Honduras, Guatemala, and western El Salvador to as far away as central Mexico, more than 1,000km from the Maya area. The shadow makes the serpent's body so that as the sun sets, the terrifying god appears to slide towards the earth. When the sun sets on these two days, the pyramid casts a shadow on itself that aligns with a carving of the head of the Mayan serpent god. It is already known that the pyramid at Chichen Itza was built according to the sun’s location during the spring and autumn equinoxes. This has led to theories that the Maya may have chosen to locate their cities in line with the stars. The Maya believed the cosmos shaped their everyday lives and they used astrological cycles to tell when to plant crops and set their calendars. Noted for the only fully developed written language of the pre-Columbian Americas, the Mayas also had highly advanced art and architecture as well as mathematical and astronomical systems.ĭuring that time, the ancient people built incredible cities using advanced machinery and gained an understanding of astronomy, as well as developing advanced agricultural methods and accurate calendars. The Maya civilisation thrived in Central America for nearly 3,000 years, reaching its height between AD 250 to 900. They found that an increase in the elite Maya's preference for corn may have made the population more vulnerable to drought, contributing to its societal collapse. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenges the findings of another research team last year.īy studying ancient faecal records, the experts, from McGill University in Canada, found both droughts and very wet periods led to key Mayan population declines.Īnother 2019 study by Northern Arizona University experts looked at the role of diet in the ability of the ancient Maya to withstand climate stress, based on remains of 50 human burials from the ancient Maya community of Cahal Pech, Belize.
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'Even given a series of droughts, maintaining a diversity of resilient crops would enable people, both ancient and modern, to adapt and survive,' Santiago said. Regardless, the study provides modern-day humans with 'ancient Maya lessons' on surviving drought – by exploiting a variety of plants – in the face of potentially catastrophic climate change this century. Heart of palm (pictured) is a vegetable harvested from the inner core and growing bud of certain palm trees There is no doubt that a series of droughts occurred in the Yucatan Peninsula of southeastern Mexico and northern Central America at the end of the ninth century, when Maya cities mysteriously began to be depopulated.īelieving the Maya were mostly dependent on drought-sensitive corn, beans, and squash, some scholars assume the droughts resulted in starvation. 'Even in the most extreme drought situation – and we have no clear evidence the most extreme situation ever occurred – 56 species of edible plants would still have persisted,' Santiago said. What's more, the plant species susceptible to drought could have been transported from areas less affected by drought in the vast Mayan Empire, which spread all the way from central Mexico to Honduras, Guatemala, and northern El Salvador. It is estimated that at its maximum, the civilisation had at least 10 million people. Santiago at the University of California, Riverside.Įven if parts of the Mayan civilisation were affected by extreme drought, many plant species would have survived. The new study was carried out by archaeologist Scott L.