[meteorite-list] Greek Crater MAYA SAILORS

From: Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:27:41 -0600
Message-ID: <00be01c946c1$5b0d71d0$274ae146_at_ATARIENGINE>

Hi, Doug, List,

Doug wrote:
> ...the Maya (not originally a seafaring culture)

    No one knows if they were "originally" a seafaring
people before they came to Yucatan in 2600 BC, but
they certainly became one. Here's a description of a
Maya coastal freighter (crew of 40, with lots of cargo)
encountered off Honduras by Columbus:
http://books.google.com/books?id=vfh70T0ZmEIC&pg=PA30&lpg=PA30&dq=columbus+maya+ship&source=web&ots=8StDQWW_vr&sig=iAN65nNm32Slcy_XK7ySYHqASdQ&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result
and here:
http://www.mesoweb.com/encyc/view.asp?record=6284&act=viewexact&view=normal&word=Maya&wordAND=&redir=no

    The noble Columbus immediately stole their cargo,
declared them all slaves, gave them Spanish names,
and put them to work... for him.

    I haven't got the energy to dig them all out, but
a number of early sources mention encounters with
large sailing craft throughout the Carribean which
seem to have been Mayan for the most part but not
exlusively Mayan. The largest ship mentioned was
about 75% of the size of the Spanish ships (which
were puny by today's standards). The average Spanish
ship was 20-30m long with a 6m beam, or the size
of four city buses tied together.

    Far more items from various Carribean islands
are found in Mayan territory than the reverse, which
suggests to me the Maya were the traders (who always
get the better end of the deal). The Phoenicians of the
Carribean? Who knows? We sure don't. I do know
that trade goods from Meso-America are found where
I live 1500 miles up the Missippippi from the nearest
ocean.

    Anthropologists seem to all be Nebraskan grad
students with black dirt between their toes, totally
committed landlubbers, and they have planted their
prejudices firmly in the science: the sea is a barrier
impassible to men not equipped with steamships!

    Pliny recorded the arrival on the shores of Gaul
a small wooden craft, "carved in one piece from a
tree trunk," with two reddish brown men with long
straight black hair, "like a horse's tail." So, the Maya
got to France, or the Caribs did. Alas (or Elas, as the
French say), it doesn't seem to have been a planned
voyage, as they had no food and water and were
quite dead on arrival, unable to discuss with learned
Pliny the vast lands they came from or to experience
French cooking. (Shall we decide this could only have
happened once in 2000 years?)

    I'm not for a minute claiming the Maya (or somebody)
sailed "1/6th of the way around the world"! But Hugo
Vihlen crossed the Atlantic in 1993 in a 5-foot-4-inch
boat. Amusingly, Villen first broke a world record for
crossing the Atlantic in a 5-foot, 11-inch boat in 1968.
His title was taken away from him in 1993 by Englishman,
Tom McNally, in a boat a few inches shorter, so...

    Shall I even mention John Fairfax and Sylvia Cook
who rowed a rowboat from San Francisco, CA to
AUSTRALIA in 361 days in 1971? And the scores of
other crazy people who have made incredible ocean
crossings in boats tiny, tinier, and tiniest? Here a short list:
http://www.microcruising.com/famoussmallboats.htm

    A powered boat is not relevant, I suppose, to the
Maya but in 1995, Seiko Nakajima in a 21ft boat with
a 2.5hp Tohatsu outboard motor arrived in New York City,
concluding an eight-month voyage that started in Basel,
Switzerland, by river, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic.
Nakajima is a model boat builder rather than a nautical
engineer, and his boat is simply a large boat model made
from wood and plastic epoxied together...
http://www.tohatsu.com/news/seiko.html

    As far as I know, nobody's done it in a solar-
powered bath tub yet... Could happen anytime now.


Sterling K. Webb
-------------------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: <mexicodoug at aim.com>
To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Friday, November 14, 2008 4:07 AM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Greek Crater


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







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Received on Fri 14 Nov 2008 08:27:41 PM PST