He..he...
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Yahoo! News
End of the Earth Postponed
Stephanie Pappas
LiveScience Senior Writer
livescience.com Tue Oct 19, 7:35 am ET
It's a good news/bad news situation for believers in the 2012 Mayan apocalypse.
The good news is that the Mayan "Long Count" calendar may not end on Dec. 21,
2012 (and, by extension, the world may not end along with it). The bad news for
prophecy believers? If the calendar doesn't end in December 2012, no one knows
when it actually will - or if it has already.
A new critique, published as a chapter in the new textbook "Calendars and Years
II: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World" (Oxbow Books, 2010),
argues that the accepted conversions of dates from Mayan to the modern calendar
may be off by as much as 50 or 100 years. That would throw the supposed and
overhyped 2012 apocalypse off by decades and cast into doubt the dates of
historical Mayan events. (The doomsday worries are based on the fact that the
Mayan calendar ends in 2012, much as our year ends on Dec. 31.)
The Mayan calendar was converted to today's Gregorian calendar using a
calculation called the GMT constant, named for the last initials of three early
Mayanist researchers. Much of the work emphasized dates recovered from colonial
documents that were written in the Mayan language in the Latin alphabet,
according to the chapter's author, Gerardo Aldana, University of California,
Santa Barbara professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies.
Later, the GMT constant was bolstered by American linguist and anthropologist
Floyd Lounsbury, who used data in the Dresden Codex Venus Table, a Mayan
calendar and almanac that charts dates relative to the movements of Venus.
"He took the position that his work removed the last obstacle to fully
accepting the GMT constant," Aldana said in a statement. "Others took his work
even further, suggesting that he had proven the GMT constant to be correct."
But according to Aldana, Lounsbury's evidence is far from irrefutable.
"If the Venus Table cannot be used to prove the FMT as Lounsbury suggests, its
acceptance depends on the reliability of the corroborating data," he said. That
historical data, he said, is less reliable than the Table itself, causing the
argument for the GMT constant to fall "like a stack of cards."
Aldana doesn't have any answers as to what the correct calendar conversion
might be, preferring to focus on why the current interpretation may be wrong.
Looks like end-of-the-world theorists may need to find another ancient calendar
on which to pin their apocalyptic hopes.
* 10 Failed Doomsday Predictions
* Earth in the Balance: 7 Crucial Tipping Points
* Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth
* Original Story: End of the Earth Postponed
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