A Canadian schoolboy has just stunned archaeologists with an amazing discovery.
A Canadian schoolboy appears to have discovered a lost Mayan city hidden deep in the jungles of Mexico using a new method of matching stars to the location of temples on earth.
William Gadoury, 15, was fascinated by the ancient Central American civilization and spent hours poring over diagrams of constellations and maps of known Mayan cities.
And then he made a startling realisation: the two appeared to be linked.
“I was really surprised and excited when I realised that the most brilliant stars of the constellations matched the largest Maya cities,” he told the Journal de Montréal.
In hundreds of years of scholarship, no other scientist had ever found such a correlation.
When he applied his theory to a 23rd constellation, he found that two of the stars already had cities linked to them but that the third star was unmatched.
William took to Google Maps and projected that there must be another city hidden deep in the thick jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.
The Canadian Space Agency agreed to train its satellite telescopes on the spot and returned with striking pictures: what appears to be an ancient Mayan pyramid and dozens of smaller structures around it.
If the satellite photographs are verified, the city would be among the largest Mayan population centers ever discovered.
It fell to William to christen the new city and he chose the name K’aak Chi, meaning Fire Mouth, and the teenager said he hoped to one day see the ruins with his own eyes.
There's more at the link.
That's fascinating! To think that a 15-year-old came up with a correlation that generations of scientists had never envisaged or considered is truly amazing. What's even more amazing is that a civilization like that of the Maya should conscientiously build their cities according to a map of the stars, rather than more practical considerations like access to water or proximity to trade routes. I don't think any other human civilization has ever done that.
I hope his school gives Mr. Gadoury a ton of extra credit for his insight and industry. Well done, sir!
Peter
11 comments:
That just goes to show that common sense STILL trumps so-called education (though I'm still all for education).
Forget extra credit, he's already done more than some trained archeologists. He deserves a full scholarship to an ivy-league.
(Or at the very least a lifetime supply of bullwhips and fedoras.) :)
On the version of the story I read - - from the BBC, I believe - - there were a couple of updates from professional archaeologists that dismissed the theory, saying that the square object seen in the photos was a fallow farm field. They also took issue with the star theory.
He deserves every point of academic credit he gets, plus the following.
The sole rights to the bottled water, postcards and fast food concessions.
Way to go kid!.
An Indiana Jones in the making - well done young man ! Most kids his age are playing Call of Duty or other video games.
If true then it's worth more than some PhD theses...
It's not actually a new theory, though it may not have been applied to the Maya before. I forget their names, but there were some researchers who did the same with ancient Egypt. 3 big pyramids at Giza =~ orians belt for example.
It sounds as though a bunch of people got excited about a supposed find and didn't do their homework. Once people who actually know what they are doing looked at it they identified the "lost Mayan city" as a 10-15 year old corn field. This should be a learning opportunity for sure, in that it should tech him and the group of people touting this discovery to actually check their work instead of rushing to conclusions.
He isn't the first to make such claims regarding ancient civilizations.
It has long been proposed that the pyramids in Egypt mirror the stars of Orion's Belt.
A decade ago Gary A. David published a book in which he demonstrated that the ancient Anasazi cities in the desert southwest are aligned with the Orion constellation.
Since the ruins of the various cities and settlements are still there, his research is rather compelling.
http://www.academia.edu/8475755/The_Orion_Zone_An_Arizona_Star_Correlation
JackCrow
The location being currently a fallow field does not preclude it from having been something else in the past. I've read the "gosh wow" and "meh" articles, and my feeling is that someone needs to look into both his theory, so that it can be validated, and the fallow field, to see if there's evidence of prior use for something else.
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