NATURE OF HUMAN NATURE
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.
William took to Google Maps and found that there must be another city hidden in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico
I was really
surprised and excited when I realised that the most brilliant stars of the
constellations matched the largest Maya cities
William Gadoury
“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.
Studying 22 different constellations, William found that
they matched the location of 117 Mayan cities scattered throughout Mexico,
Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
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.
“It would be the culmination of my three years of work
and the dream of my life,” he said. He became interested in the Mayans after
reading about their predictions that the world would end in 2012.
Reaching
the city will not be easy. It is in one of the most remote and inaccessible
areas of Mexico and an archaeological mission would be costly.
"It's
always about money. Expedition costs are horribly expensive,” said Dr. Armand
LaRocque, a specialist at the University of New Brunswick.
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