Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren vogelbam here. By using a technology called lidar to
Speaker 1: peer through the dense tree canopy of the Guatemalan jungle
Speaker 1: from above, researchers have been covered a massive network of
Speaker 1: ancient Mayan ruins which have been hidden for centuries. The discovery,
Speaker 1: first reported by National Geographic, promises to alter our understanding
Speaker 1: of the Maya civilization by revealing that it was far
Speaker 1: bigger in scale and more advanced and complex than previously believed.
Speaker 1: Researchers located the ruins of more than sixty thousand houses, palaces, highways,
Speaker 1: and other man made features. A press release by the
Speaker 1: University of Houston, home of the National Center for Airborne
Speaker 1: Laser Mapping or ENCOM, describes the find as sprawling over
Speaker 1: an area of eight hundred and eleven square miles that's
Speaker 1: about square kilometers. To appreciate the size of this Maya megalopolis,
Speaker 1: consider this it was one point seven times bigger than
Speaker 1: the modern day city of Los Angeles. According to National Geographic.
Speaker 1: The discovery suggests that the Maya civilization, which piqued one thousand,
Speaker 1: two hundred years ago, was highly sophisticated. CNN reported that
Speaker 1: the findings include a pyramid ninety feet that's twenty seven
Speaker 1: meters tall, as well as evidence of agriculture, quarries and fortifications,
Speaker 1: plus an extensive road system that connected settlements. According to CNN,
Speaker 1: researchers believe that ten million people lived in the region,
Speaker 1: many times more than previous estimates. We spoke via email
Speaker 1: with Thomas Garrison, a Maya archeologist and assistant professor at
Speaker 1: Ithaca College who worked with other researchers on the project.
Speaker 1: He said these findings are important because the data lay
Speaker 1: bare an entire civilization that has not been disrupted by
Speaker 1: modern development. The work was done in conjunction with a
Speaker 1: Guatemalan non profit that focuses upon aiding scientific and archaeological
Speaker 1: research and efforts to preserve local cultural heritage. Garrison explains,
Speaker 1: we don't just see the big sites. Instead, we're seeing
Speaker 1: all of the infrastructure that made the Maya civilization function,
Speaker 1: how they fed themselves, how they traveled, and how they
Speaker 1: defended themselves. From the density of the settlement, he said,
Speaker 1: we now know that the ancient Maya were able to
Speaker 1: sustain a population in this region that was substantially greater
Speaker 1: than what exists in the present, and they did so
Speaker 1: for over a thousand years. Diane Davies, a British archaeologist
Speaker 1: and educator who specializes in the Maya, says the discovery
Speaker 1: of the extensive ruins could help challenge widely held assumptions
Speaker 1: about the Maya culture, such as the belief that challenges
Speaker 1: of living in the rainforest environment would have limited the
Speaker 1: population size. She said via email. The Maya lived in
Speaker 1: this area for over one thousand, five hundred years in
Speaker 1: the millions. To live this long and at such high
Speaker 1: numbers suggests that they were not only highly efficient in
Speaker 1: their agricultural systems, but also environmentally aware. That is, they
Speaker 1: knew the limitations of the environment and sought to protect it.
Speaker 1: The new findings add to existing evidence of the Maya
Speaker 1: civilizations advanced state, such as their writing system, mathematics, and
Speaker 1: complex calendars. The Maya, Davies said, had some of the
Speaker 1: largest temple pyramids in the world, all built without metal tools,
Speaker 1: the wheel or pack animals. These are just a few
Speaker 1: of their achievements and why people need to reevaluate the Maya.
Speaker 1: The discovery also is another example of how light aar,
Speaker 1: which stands for light detection and ranging is rapidly revolutionizing archaeology.
Speaker 1: Instead of hacking through the jungle in search of ruins,
Speaker 1: researchers can fly over it in an aircraft equipped with
Speaker 1: a laser and other equipment. By firing hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of laser pulses each second, they can collect data and
Speaker 1: create a three dimensional map of the ground surface and
Speaker 1: its features. LIGHTAR was first developed by NASA in the
Speaker 1: early nineteen seventies as a tool for space exploration. The
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one Apollo fifteen mission used an early lighter
Speaker 1: instrument to map the Moon's surface topography from orbit, and
Speaker 1: scientists would also use it to study Mars and detail
Speaker 1: the shape of an asteroid. But archaeologists figured out how
Speaker 1: to adapt the technology to find ancient ruins in remote places.
Speaker 1: In the early twenty teens, researchers utilized LIGHTAR to locate
Speaker 1: Lasieu da Blanca, the white city in Honduras whose existence
Speaker 1: had been the subject of rumor in legend since the
Speaker 1: days of her Non Cortes. More recently, others used LIDAR
Speaker 1: to scan the Cambodian jungle and uncover a fourteen hundred
Speaker 1: year old city that would have rivaled nom Fen in
Speaker 1: size and Calm Director Ramesh L. Shress The says that
Speaker 1: LDAR technology has become vastly more powerful since he began
Speaker 1: to use it in the late nineteen nineties. In that time,
Speaker 1: devices have gone from shooting three thousand pulses per second
Speaker 1: to nine hundred thousand today. That results in much higher
Speaker 1: resolution maps and has reduced the amount of time required
Speaker 1: to cover an area such as the Maya site, essentially
Speaker 1: making a project of this scale possible. According to shress
Speaker 1: theo though the Maya megalopolis may be dwarfed by even
Speaker 1: bigger future LEDAR projects, he said, researchers eventually want to
Speaker 1: map areas that are nearly fifty eight hundred square miles
Speaker 1: that's nearly fifteen thousand kilometers in Guatemala and Mexico m
Speaker 1: Today's episode was written by Patrick Jake Tiger and produced
Speaker 1: by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of
Speaker 1: other massive topics, visit our home planet, testaf works dot com.