[meteorite-list] Greek Crater MAYA SAILORS
From: Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:27:06 -0600 Message-ID: <00d801c946c9$a8608b40$274ae146_at_ATARIENGINE> Hi, Bob, List, We didn't "jump." We ambled. EP opined the Maya knew about the Rio Cuarto impact. Doug opined they couldn't have gone there to check, as the lands are impassible and the Maya were not a seafaring people. And I opined they were. See? An "amble," perhaps a "mosey," but not a jump. I don't think Doug appreciates that EP believes this Rio Cuarto event to be only one result of the chaos of a cometary breakup or series of breakups in the inner solar system which would bombard the Earth with small rubble (and some bigger rubble, too). There would plentiful evidence of what was going on (however poorly understood) in the night skies. Quite possibly nobody had to go anywhere to see much of what was happening. Someone ought to mention that not all investigators are convinced the Rio Cuarto craters are the result of an impact: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_Cuarto_craters But debate continues without resolution. Just Google "Rio Cuarto crates." On topic. Sterling K. Webb ---------------------------------------------------------------- ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bob Loeffler" <bobl at peaktopeak.com> To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com> Sent: Friday, November 14, 2008 7:44 PM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Greek Crater MAYA SAILORS I think we've jumped way OFF TOPIC here. :-) Bob -----Original Message----- From: meteorite-list-bounces at meteoritecentral.com [mailto:meteorite-list-bounces at meteoritecentral.com] On Behalf Of Sterling K. Webb Sent: Friday, November 14, 2008 6:28 PM To: meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com; mexicodoug at aim.com Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Greek Crater MAYA SAILORS 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+m aya+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 ______________________________________________ http://www.meteoritecentral.com Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list ______________________________________________ http://www.meteoritecentral.com Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list ______________________________________________ http://www.meteoritecentral.com Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list ______________________________________________ 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 09:27:06 PM PST |
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