I was a really smart kid, but nothing like this:
A teenager from Quebec has discovered an ancient Mayan city without leaving his province’s borders.
William Gadoury is a 15-year-old student from Saint-Jean-de-Matha in Lanaudière, Quebec. The precocious teen has been fascinated by all things Mayan for several years, devouring any information he could find on the topic.
During his research, Gadoury examined 22 Mayan constellations and discovered that if he projected those constellations onto a map, the shapes corresponded perfectly with the locations of 117 Mayan cities. Incredibly, the 15-year-old was the first person to establish this important correlation, reported the Journal de Montreal over the weekend.
Then Gadoury took it one step further. He examined a twenty-third constellation which contained three stars, yet only two corresponded to known cities.
Gadoury’s hypothesis? There had to be a city in the place where that third star fell on the map.
Satellite images later confirmed that, indeed, geometric shapes visible from above imply that an ancient city with a large pyramid and thirty buildings stands exactly where Gadoury said they would be. If the find is confirmed, it would be the fourth largest Mayan city in existence.
You might find the following entertaining.
The three Great Pyramids of Giza in Egypt show the same alignment as Gadoury ‘s three cities do.
Both are patterned after the three stars in Orion’s Belt.
Sirius, The Dog Star, is the brightest star in the night sky.
If you draw a line straight down from Orion’s Belt you’ll find Sirius (or vice versa).
Osiris, the husband of Isis, was the chief god of Egypt who resided in Orion’s Belt.
Isis represented the first woman.
All of the Egyptian pyramids were built in close proximity to the Nile River.
Sirius was used by the Egyptians to indicated the Nile’s flooding and the time to plant. (Sirius and Osiris; the spelling seems to close to be just a coincidence.)
The Nile has dramatically changed its course over the last 5000 years leaving the pyramids high and dry.
The assumption can be made that all Mayan cities were once located close to rivers which have either dried up or receded.
Both those pieces are fascinating.Thanks.
As a lifelong professional archaeologist who started his career working in MesoAmerica . . . fuckin’ kids these days.
You are being too credulous. Here’s what a real scientist (PZ Myers) has to say about this dubious sort of scientific method. It does seem to be pareidolia. You know, Jesus on a tortilla, Virgin Mary on a road sign, Drumphthf on a condom wrapper.
So yeah, it was really necessary to attack me in order to put the post in perspective. Thanks!
None of those articles trying to belittle Gadoury’s achievement contained anything substantive – so I’m less inclined to believe them actually. Gadoury has done something seasoned professional archeologists never even imagined – so of course they are pissed. Academics can be notoriously jealous of one another (think Dead Sea scrolls and how long that took to go public!).
And that is not a GD cornfield or there’d be thousands of them.
P.S. I’m not sure exactly what a “real” scientist is – a degree perhaps? Do you know how many astronomical discoveries are made every year by amateur sky-watchers? That attitude stifles scientific achievement and is exactly the kind of snobbery I referenced above.
There are plenty of “real” scientists with PHDs who are dumber than a bag of hammers.
I didn’t intend to attack you, but the article did not convey a lot of evidence, so I would have thought you’d be more skeptical, what with your journalism background. What Gadoury did was interesting but very preliminary type of research, with no ground-truthing. Here’s the latest on the flap:Those are either abandoned cornfields or marijuana grows.