Last night on a UK BBC2 programme with Prof Brian Cox Stargazing Live, he joked with comedian Dara O'briaine about how the Mayans had no knowledge of astronomy what-so-ever. I beg to differ that they would only have to correlate the closest approach of the planet Venus with the ash plumes of distant vocanoes from their mountain top!!
A town culture with proto-astronomy is likely to have evolved from around 195,000 years ago The Oldest Homo Sapiens: Fossils Push Human Emergence Back To 195,000 Years Ago
The Mayans had intimate knowledge of astronomy- so did most civilizations thousands of years ago. We stopped looking to the heavens when Galileo turned them into math formulas and even today we all read our horiscopes. To suggest otherwise is foolish. No wonder Mayan leaders would kill their astronomers when a solar eclipse happened- it was an unforseen event of great importance to these people who mapped the heavens a thousand years ago.
Thanks for your input and well said. I forgot about the solar eclipses, how many total eclipses would have been witnessed by the Mayan culture I wonder?
I also remembers seeing a big stone hieroglyph with a seated mayan man looking through a long telescope-like instrument. I think it was in the book Supergods. Can't find the pic on google though, which is a shame.
