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Scientists finally solved chilling mystery of why the Mayans vanished after thousands of years
Mayans have always been a topic of interest renowned for their hieroglyphic writing, agricultural achievements, as well as their ancient calendar that famously predicted an apocalypse back in 2012.
Around A.D. 250, the Maya entered an era in which they peaked in population size and built thriving cities with temples and palaces.
However, by the end of the period, around A.D. 900, almost all of the major cities civilised by Maya had been abandoned.
So, where did they go?
Tuul & Bruno Morandi / Getty
Well before, we get ahead of ourselves, the Mayans didn’t completely vanish as they are still here to this day.
As Lisa Lucero, professor of anthropology and medieval studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, explained: ‘It was the Maya political system that collapsed, not [their] society.
‘The over 7 million Maya living today in Central America and beyond attest to this fact.’
Previously, it was proposed by NASA that the fall of the Maya city-states occurred as a result of prolonged periods of drought.
‘Less rainfall likely impacted canoe trade since water levels noticeably drop each dry season — so less rain meant less canoe travel,’ Lucero added.
However, some Mayans survived this disaster.
Anton Petrus / Getty
In science author and historian Jared Diamond’s book Collapse, he mentioned that the drought was just the tip of the iceberg.
The actual cause of the Mayan vanishing was a result of their own environmental mess up – perhaps an all-too-familiar issue given today’s current climate?
The Mayans cut down hundreds to thousands of trees to build their monuments – 1 metre of material required 20 burned trees.
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The Gift of the Maya
The Gift of the Maya
It takes a bit of time for the elegance of a food forest to emerge, something on the order of decades. Strolling the garden through the morning mist in a hot Tennessee summer, we tried to remember what this landscape looked like 21 years ago, when we moved to this site, set up our yurt and started in on our little corner of paradise.
What we see today does not remotely resemble what was here then. Then there was a wire-fenced, stony horse paddock in a re-emerging poplar forest. The deep soil tilth now is blanketed in thick vines, their giant leaves hiding pumpkins, squashes and melons. Bamboo cathedrals twined with akebia and passionfruit arch 70 feet (20 meters) over a duck pond next to our cob henhouse. As we let out our poultry for their daily bug chase, bullfrogs croak and leap away. A snapping turtle submerges beneath the mat of duckweed and hyacinths at the water’s edge. All around us figs, peaches, apples, pears, blueberries, cranberries, cherries, plums and persimmons bend down boughs under the weight of their fruit, rabbits stealing out to grab a windfall and then hop back to cover, while high up in the oaks, beech, butternuts and hickories, squirrel forest wardens check the progress of their winter larder.
All this complexity, shrouded in mist and glistening in dew, would not be called orderly by farmers trained in Ag schools or raised in a tradition of straight rows and powerful machines with air-conditioned cabs. They can pump food from the earth the way you would pump barrels of oil, but not without depleting reserves accumulated over eons. As they pour on chemicals, the genetically monocultured crops gradually but inexorably lose nutrient density and attract predators.
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Seneca’s pyramids: how fast did the Mayan civilization fall?
Seneca’s pyramids: how fast did the Mayan civilization fall?
Monument building cycle of the Mayan civilization. From “Sylvanus G. Morley and George W. Brainerd, The Ancient Maya, Third Edition (Stanford University Press, 1956), page 66.”. Courtesy of Diego Mantilla.
Once you give a name to a phenomenon, you can focus your attention on it and learn more and more about it. So, the “Seneca Cliff” idea turns out to be a fruitful one. It tells us that, in several cases, the cycle of exploitation of a natural resource follows a forward skewed curve, where decline is much faster than growth. This is consistent with what the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca wrote: “increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.” With some mathematical tricks, the result is the following curve:
This curve describes the behavior of several complex systems, including entire civilizations which experienced an abrupt collapse after a long period of relatively slow growth. In my first post on the seneca cliff, I already discussed the collapse of the Mayan Civilization (*)
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Achieving Sustainable Societies: Lessons from Modelling the Ancient Maya | Solutions
Achieving Sustainable Societies: Lessons from Modelling the Ancient Maya | Solutions.
The ancient Maya provide an example of a complex social-ecological system which developed impressively before facing catastrophic reorganization. In order for our contemporary globally-connected society to avoid a similar fate, we aim to learn how the ancient Maya system functioned, and whether it might have been possible to maintain resilience and avoid collapse. The MayaSim computer model was constructed to test hypotheses on whether system-level interventions might have resulted in a different outcome for the simulated society. We find that neither collapse nor sustainability are inevitable, and the fate of social-ecological systems relates to feedbacks between the human and biophysical world, which interact as fast and slow variables and across spatial and temporal scales. In the case of the ancient Maya, what is considered the ‘peak’ of their social development might have also been the ‘nadir’ of overall social-ecological resilience. Nevertheless, modelling results suggest that resilience can be achieved and long-term sustainability possible, but changes in sub-systems need to be maintained within safe operating boundaries.
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