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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,

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Speaker 1: Lauren vogelbam here. By using a technology called lidar to

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Speaker 1: peer through the dense tree canopy of the Guatemalan jungle

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Speaker 1: from above, researchers have been covered a massive network of

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Speaker 1: ancient Mayan ruins which have been hidden for centuries. The discovery,

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Speaker 1: first reported by National Geographic, promises to alter our understanding

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Speaker 1: of the Maya civilization by revealing that it was far

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Speaker 1: bigger in scale and more advanced and complex than previously believed.

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Speaker 1: Researchers located the ruins of more than sixty thousand houses, palaces, highways,

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Speaker 1: and other man made features. A press release by the

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Speaker 1: University of Houston, home of the National Center for Airborne

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Speaker 1: Laser Mapping or ENCOM, describes the find as sprawling over

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Speaker 1: an area of eight hundred and eleven square miles that's

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Speaker 1: about square kilometers. To appreciate the size of this Maya megalopolis,

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Speaker 1: consider this it was one point seven times bigger than

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Speaker 1: the modern day city of Los Angeles. According to National Geographic.

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Speaker 1: The discovery suggests that the Maya civilization, which piqued one thousand,

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Speaker 1: two hundred years ago, was highly sophisticated. CNN reported that

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Speaker 1: the findings include a pyramid ninety feet that's twenty seven

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Speaker 1: meters tall, as well as evidence of agriculture, quarries and fortifications,

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Speaker 1: plus an extensive road system that connected settlements. According to CNN,

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Speaker 1: researchers believe that ten million people lived in the region,

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Speaker 1: many times more than previous estimates. We spoke via email

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Speaker 1: with Thomas Garrison, a Maya archeologist and assistant professor at

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Speaker 1: Ithaca College who worked with other researchers on the project.

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Speaker 1: He said these findings are important because the data lay

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Speaker 1: bare an entire civilization that has not been disrupted by

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Speaker 1: modern development. The work was done in conjunction with a

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Speaker 1: Guatemalan non profit that focuses upon aiding scientific and archaeological

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Speaker 1: research and efforts to preserve local cultural heritage. Garrison explains,

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Speaker 1: we don't just see the big sites. Instead, we're seeing

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Speaker 1: all of the infrastructure that made the Maya civilization function,

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Speaker 1: how they fed themselves, how they traveled, and how they

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Speaker 1: defended themselves. From the density of the settlement, he said,

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Speaker 1: we now know that the ancient Maya were able to

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Speaker 1: sustain a population in this region that was substantially greater

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Speaker 1: than what exists in the present, and they did so

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Speaker 1: for over a thousand years. Diane Davies, a British archaeologist

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Speaker 1: and educator who specializes in the Maya, says the discovery

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Speaker 1: of the extensive ruins could help challenge widely held assumptions

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Speaker 1: about the Maya culture, such as the belief that challenges

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Speaker 1: of living in the rainforest environment would have limited the

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Speaker 1: population size. She said via email. The Maya lived in

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Speaker 1: this area for over one thousand, five hundred years in

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Speaker 1: the millions. To live this long and at such high

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Speaker 1: numbers suggests that they were not only highly efficient in

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Speaker 1: their agricultural systems, but also environmentally aware. That is, they

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Speaker 1: knew the limitations of the environment and sought to protect it.

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Speaker 1: The new findings add to existing evidence of the Maya

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Speaker 1: civilizations advanced state, such as their writing system, mathematics, and

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Speaker 1: complex calendars. The Maya, Davies said, had some of the

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Speaker 1: largest temple pyramids in the world, all built without metal tools,

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Speaker 1: the wheel or pack animals. These are just a few

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Speaker 1: of their achievements and why people need to reevaluate the Maya.

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Speaker 1: The discovery also is another example of how light aar,

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Speaker 1: which stands for light detection and ranging is rapidly revolutionizing archaeology.

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Speaker 1: Instead of hacking through the jungle in search of ruins,

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Speaker 1: researchers can fly over it in an aircraft equipped with

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Speaker 1: a laser and other equipment. By firing hundreds of thousands

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Speaker 1: of laser pulses each second, they can collect data and

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Speaker 1: create a three dimensional map of the ground surface and

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Speaker 1: its features. LIGHTAR was first developed by NASA in the

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Speaker 1: early nineteen seventies as a tool for space exploration. The

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Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one Apollo fifteen mission used an early lighter

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Speaker 1: instrument to map the Moon's surface topography from orbit, and

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Speaker 1: scientists would also use it to study Mars and detail

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Speaker 1: the shape of an asteroid. But archaeologists figured out how

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Speaker 1: to adapt the technology to find ancient ruins in remote places.

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Speaker 1: In the early twenty teens, researchers utilized LIGHTAR to locate

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Speaker 1: Lasieu da Blanca, the white city in Honduras whose existence

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Speaker 1: had been the subject of rumor in legend since the

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Speaker 1: days of her Non Cortes. More recently, others used LIDAR

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Speaker 1: to scan the Cambodian jungle and uncover a fourteen hundred

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Speaker 1: year old city that would have rivaled nom Fen in

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Speaker 1: size and Calm Director Ramesh L. Shress The says that

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Speaker 1: LDAR technology has become vastly more powerful since he began

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Speaker 1: to use it in the late nineteen nineties. In that time,

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Speaker 1: devices have gone from shooting three thousand pulses per second

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Speaker 1: to nine hundred thousand today. That results in much higher

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Speaker 1: resolution maps and has reduced the amount of time required

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Speaker 1: to cover an area such as the Maya site, essentially

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Speaker 1: making a project of this scale possible. According to shress

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Speaker 1: theo though the Maya megalopolis may be dwarfed by even

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Speaker 1: bigger future LEDAR projects, he said, researchers eventually want to

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Speaker 1: map areas that are nearly fifty eight hundred square miles

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Speaker 1: that's nearly fifteen thousand kilometers in Guatemala and Mexico m

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Speaker 1: Today's episode was written by Patrick Jake Tiger and produced

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Speaker 1: by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of

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Speaker 1: other massive topics, visit our home planet, testaf works dot com.