| BY GINA COOK ANCHOR LAUREN ZIMA If you thought you could get out of Christmas shopping this year because the world was coming to an end on December 21st — think again. Archaeologists discovered another Mayan calendar in Guatemala showing the Earth's time will continue beyond December. A writer for the Boston Globe explains how a Boston University student discovered the calendar by chance while the team was excavating Mayan ruins. "...BU undergraduate, Maxwell Chamberlain, spotted a faded painting on a patch of wall during his lunch break ... William Saturno, an assistant professor of archeology at BU who led the team, began an excavation, and discovered a magnificent, nearly life-sized portrait of a Maya king..." A 6 by 6 foot room houses the calendar with delicately painted hieroglyphs, numbers, and notations — never seen before. Here's a video from National Geographic: "Inside on the walls a well preserved mural and some mysterious astronomical and calendar symbols." Live Science says those calendar symbols are ... "...complex indeed, featuring stacked bars and dots representing fives and ones and recording lunar cycles in six-month chunks of time. ... The Maya recorded time in a series of cycles, ... called baktuns. ... In one column, the ancient scribe even worked out a cycle of time recording 17 baktuns." That 17 baktuns means time will extend 7000 years into the future — contradicting the previous Mayan calendar that resulted in end of the world rumors. The Daily ... |
