![]() ![]() Humans were sacrificed to appease the gods. It was strictly hierarchical and deeply spiritual. Mayan society was vibrant, but it could also be brutal. Their civilisation was so stable and established, they even had a word for a 400-year time period. They also had their own system of writing. They developed their own mathematics, using a base number of 20, and had a concept of zero. From observatories, like the one at Chichen Itza, they tracked the progress of the war star, Venus. They tracked a solar year of 365 days and one of the few surviving ancient Maya books contains tables of eclipses. ![]() Without the use of the cartwheel or metal tools, they built massive stone structures. The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program and the Italian Ministry of the Environment helped to fund the study.The Maya thrived for nearly 2,000 years. Other authors of the study are Marcello Canuto of Tulane University, Mark Brenner and Jason Curtis of the University of Florida, David Hodell of Cambridge University, and Timothy Eglinton of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and ETH Zurich. ![]() “This highlights the importance of taking a long-term perspective in adapting to future climate change, especially considering predictions of very severe climate impacts in the latter part of this century and beyond,” Douglas added. ![]() “The research makes clear that the ancient Maya were not passive victims of climate change - they adapted in response to drought, but it only worked up to a point,” Douglas said. The hydrogen isotopes enabled the team to study drought and precipitation amounts, while the carbon isotope signatures provided insights into agricultural methods. The research team looked at hydrogen and carbon isotopes in leaf waxes from two lake sediment cores in Mexico’s northern Yucatan region and in Guatemala. The dominant agricultural technique shifted from swidden - a method of clearing land by slashing and burning - to a more intensive and concentrated system of crop production. Pagani and his colleagues, including first author Peter Douglas, now at the California Institute of Technology, argue that a change in maize production during an earlier period of drought allowed populations to continue to grow. Indeed, evidence of Maya resilience and efforts to adapt to climate change also emerged in the research. There was actual expansion there after the collapse, but the southern cities never recovered.” “The north was already accustomed to fairly dry conditions and did much better. “The south was the center of the Maya population, and their capacity to adapt was limited,” Pagani explained. Pagani is also the director of the Yale Climate and Energy Institute. “Our work demonstrates that the southern Maya lowlands experienced a more severe drought compared to the north,” said Mark Pagani, a Yale University professor of geology and geophysics and co-author of the study, published April 20 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The new information provides answers to longstanding questions about the role climate change played in Maya cultural collapse between 800 and 950 A.D. Researchers found that markers of historic droughts in Central America match the patterns of disruption to Maya society during centuries of hardship. A new study pinpoints the devastating effects of climate change on ancient Maya civilization, despite attempts to adapt to it. ![]()
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