[meteorite-list] Greek Crater
From: mexicodoug at aim.com <mexicodoug_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2008 05:07:18 -0500 Message-ID: <8CB1457E6BE0630-D48-288D_at_WEBMAIL-DF21.sysops.aol.com> Hi Ed, (=Mee lek oyote Lukarto,) Hours earlier I'd actually just returned from a trip through the perilous, distant, and truly lawless mountaine region of the classic proto-Maya civilization. But I'm thankfully back safe now. I can now imagine without too much a leap of faith, how savagely dangerous this was centuries ago. After this mission of daredevilry bent on recovering a very special item, I sent you appropriate greetings in a living written language descended from the Maya, relating to your post at that moment. Unfortunately the novelty is worn off by now and it is SSDD mode again. So send the scholars back to their codices, they couldn't have helped anyways. I appreciate your organization of progressive conjectures and will look for your book somewhere lost in storage to review. Things have been very busy for me lately and I am so far behind in my basic scientific reading that even this reply is a challenge which is my excuse for not getting to your book. But that is hardly the point of my question to you. I find your statement inadequate: "have little doubt that the Maya, "Olmec", and others dispatched "researchers" to the impact site." Based on your justification(!!)(Conjecture): "fragments were visible for a long time, they watched them come in, and the resulting ecological collapse was catastrophic." The distances seem way too unreasonable. Seeing this and then =0 Afollowing it to Rio Cuarto. Maybe the (prot-)Maya did triangulate nd had a good map of South America beynd the Andes. But, your justification is purely circumstantial and it seems to me as a biased solution looking for a problem. The Maya mythology I read is far too rudimentary (and not Maya style) to make this leap of faith as you've done in your post. More on this after I rant a bit in melancholic pride, in a review of just who you are talking about with these vague interpretations. The Maya are te Germans and Swiss of the world of precision in astronomy and math. To my knowledge there is no prominent ecological destruction myth for the Maya, nor for that matter any prominent comet, meteor, or impact event (just a hurricane and his lightning bolts brothers) though you may have a different spin on this. Creation, in one popular mythology version, came out of the water by feathered snakes which were Hurricane and fellow brothers lightning bolts (Is this your thought?). In any case, this refers to creation, so the total destruction by big space rock fragment idea seems contradictory and unsupported in a very complex society. Anyway the myth could mean just about anything you want it to. The Maya were the best mathematicians and astronomers in the world through their time. They understood and used zero in their mathematics well before 36 B.C., being the first documented use anywhere . While Western civilizations were in the dark the Maya maintained a better written record (on better quality paper they developed in America) than any papyrus of Alexandria. The only sin against mankind's scientific development worse than the destruction of the library at Alexandria by zealots was the brute stupidity of gold diggers and carpetbaggers calling themselves conquistadores (and in English, pirates), in the form of ignorant Iberians that completely destroyed wholesale the entire written record en masse of a scientifically more advanced civilization by zealous and subjucating decree. Only three randomly surviving original books written by the Maya remain of our civilization of city states of tens o million of inhabitants. And in them we find not only the most accurate calendars the world ever saw to that time, but also the precise calculations of the ephemeris, rise and set times of Venus and its daytime observation to refine predictions (when the Greeks didn't even figure out that the morning and evening planet were the same one), "we" are only today learning that some of the cyclical behaviors they identified or Mars went over Western civilizations' heads until we learned to read their remaining 3 books. A people supposed without telescopes with those daytime observations, that put the Orion nebula (M42) at the center of the hearth for its nebulous quality, a people that apparently believed they are descended f rom the Pleiades (M45) which, according to them, was a stellar nursery. Imagine that, who would have ever imagined the Pleiades was a Stellar nursery? The length of the year the length of the Astronomical solar year (365.24219 days) of the Maya was 365.2422 days and it took a while for Europe to catch up after the fall of the Maya. With such precision, it is no surprise that the Maya calculated and predicted future eclipses well enough probably to entertain Fred Espenack today. On the other hand, bloodletting was an important part of Maya culture, not to mention the reputed 8,000 kilometer journey to Rio Cuarto crossing the Andes and Darien would be filled with other problem beasty folks along the way, jaguars, wild peccaries (javelinas), piranha, lotsa snakes, congas and the like. It is hard to believe that anything except commerce could make the journey Moroccan style (passing durable goods or dried seeds through many hands), and then the one back for a total of 16,000 km. Although the Maya predated DaVinci by recognizing and incorporating the golden ratio in their calculations, they didn't invent flying machines... You are asking the Maya (not originally a seafaring culture) be Marco Polo. Heck Europe was only 9,000 km away by sea from Rio Cuarto even though it?s in the southern hemisphere. If you want to believe that curious Maya (or proto-Maya) investigators were dispatched to go check out20Rio Cuarto, Ed, well considering there is no clear extant reference to the worthy to be called Maya. These are not marginal indigenous folks, you are talking about an astronomical culture historically not to be confused with the stereotypical "see great snake in the sky eat corn and spit smoke" type. Any (proto-)Maya geek astronomers attempting that journey at the time wouldn't have made the trip of 1/6 of the world and back through hundreds of unfriendly cultures that would have them for dinner. Your premises, I believe, unless you have a better explanation, are simply too vague, unfeasible, and wishful in this specific case - or does your book hold some secret as big as the codices themselves? It just doesn't fit in my judgement so IMO the burden of rigorous proof ought to be heavier on your shoulders before you can get away with such statements. As was said, "The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness." Best wishes, me^ tak'in, Doug -----Original Message----- From: E.P. Grondine <epgrondine at yahoo.com> To: meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com Sent: Thu, 13 Nov 2008 7:17 pm Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Greek Crater Hi Doug - Not being fluent in Mayan, I had to rely on the translations of the hieroglyph scholars. As for how the Maya knew about the impacts, the fragments were visible for a long time, they watched them come in, and the=2 0resulting ecological collapse was catastrophic. Everyone who survived talked about it afterwards, and I have little doubt that the Maya, "Olmec", and others dispatched "researchers" to the impact site. When are you going to get out your magnifying glass and read your copy of "Man and Impact in the Americas"? good hunting, Ed >Lukarto G wrote: >"The RC dates for this catastrophe match with the Mayan date for >Rio Cuarto" >k'uxi Kamiko Lukarto, Amikoetik, >Ed, it's interesting that the Maya had a date for Rio Cuarto. Don you >believe the Comenchingones communicated with the great Maya >astronomers? Or how else could you propose the Maya knew about >craters in the heartland of Argentina? They are nearly as far away >from the craters as equatorial Africa is, right?! >Best wishes, me^ tak'in, >Doug ______________________________________________ http://www.meteoritecentral.com Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list Received on Fri 14 Nov 2008 05:07:18 AM PST |
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