2k-year-old Mayan civilization discovered in northern Guatemala | Hacker News Reader

2k-year-old Mayan civilization discovered in northern Guatemala

phys.org

103 pointswglb26 comments

They found ruins of a civilization. If they found an actual civilization, it would be a political matter.

Interesting! Although I found the original paper much more illuminating than the write-up: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ancient-mesoamerica/...

Also, the use of the word „civilisation“ here feels wrong. What they discovered was an early, large-scale polity of a known civilisation.

I am always on the lookout for more about the 23ky-old Gunung Padang pyramid on Java. It was long thought just a hill, until it was shown to have been built instead. As far as I know only Danny Widjaja is working on it. It should have a whole department excavating it.

According to Wikipedia, the accepted dating is much more recent (~2kyo).

> Thirty-four Indonesian scientists signed a petition questioning the motives and methods of the Hilman-Arif team. Archaeologist Víctor Pérez described Natawidjaja's conclusions as pseudoarchaeology.

Wikipedia is singularly unreliable on prehistory, being curated largely by retired history professors out to defend whatever they argued back in grad school.

What matters more than petitions is actual surface luminescence measurements.

They've taken subsequent radiocarbon dates and they're much more recent. OSL is a newer, more expensive technique that performs poorly in wet, volcanic rock, much less in an area that probably doesn't have highly refined curves. It's likely that no one has taken any samples.

> retired history professors

I would still rate this group as more reliable than pseudo archeologists with a political agenda.

A former (or current) history professor who blocks reporting of current measurements is a psuedo-what-have-you.

A very current example is Younger Dryas Impact deniers. (Note that doubting the Impact actually caused the Younger Dryas cold spell does not by itself make one such a denier.)

You're right. That does not make the absurd claims about that site being 20k year old any less absurd though.

> Younger Dryas Impact

Is a hypothesis a not somehow proven fact. Barely even a theory.

As of 2019 it is fact. You would need to come up with something else to account for all the evidence. The only remotely plausible alternative would be volcanism, but without sulfur.

It sounds interesting but also relatively easy to prove/disprove. Danny Hilman Natawidjaja claimed 1-3 meters down is a man made matrix of rock so that’s the easiest place to start. If he was so confident surely he’d have proved it by now?

Interestingly, the picture he drew even looks like a volcano.

https://www.sciencealert.com/the-world-s-oldest-pyramid-is-h...

Last I heard the ID Govt had forbidden excavations.

Apparently they had a large funding budget for that site at one point. Danny & team went out there and dug it up with hoes quickly, so perhaps that is part of the reason why you can’t excavate now

Fun fact: People descended from these civilizations still exist, broadly called Maya peoples, although they don't really view themselves as a singular group because they all have their own cultures/languages/civilizations they came from!

There is still Nahuatl. Which I imagine has splintered like Latin, but really don't know.

The Nahua people are a distinct ethnical group from the Mayas.

The Nahua people were already subdivided into multiple ethnic groups a mllenia ago. Famous examples are the Mexica people (Aztecs) and Toltecs.

I am corrected. Do we have a name for the language family Mayans' descendants speak?

The language family is literally called "Mayan".

As an aside, the people are Maya without an -n.

Yes, actual languages in that family are for example Kʼicheʼ, Yucatec, Mopan

I wonder if these people have immunity to malaria and other types of rainforest diseases.

BBC Compass podcast about building China funding train line through this area for tourism:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct4kxr

Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34115109

5-year-old discussion that may or may not be related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16291272

Tangent: Guatemala remains one of my favorite travels. The Mayan ruins are stunning, especially Tikal (Yavin 4 for you Star Wars fans), you can hike on volcanos or in jungles, and I can't recommend enough the old Spanish city of Antigua. (Lake Atitlán was fine. Skip Livingston beach on the east coast.)

From the title I was imagining an uncontacted tribe like the Sentinelese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese

If anyone's interested in a very accessible look at LIDAR exploration, I highly recommend explorer Albert Lin's National Geographic series Lost Cities.[1]

[1] https://www.natgeotv.com/za/shows/natgeo/lost-cities-with-al...

Those ruins have been there for a while. Guatemala got 'em all a long time ago.

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