[HN Gopher] Hundreds of ancient Maya sites hidden under Mexico r...
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Hundreds of ancient Maya sites hidden under Mexico reveal a
mysterious blueprint
Author : stareatgoats
Score : 199 points
Date : 2021-11-06 07:57 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sciencealert.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencealert.com)
| fsiefken wrote:
| does this rectangular shape have a special mathematical property
| like the golden ratio or 1:4:9?
| zaik wrote:
| If you look hard enough there is always a 'special'
| mathematical property to everything
| andrew_ wrote:
| The parallel between similarities of modern day stadiums and
| arenas in many major cities, and structures bearing similar size
| and shape to one another shared among major population centers in
| this part of the ancient world, is striking.
| photon-torpedo wrote:
| Indeed, on seeing the pictures in the article I got the feeling
| that these might as well be structures used for playing a kind
| of sport, requiring a standardized shape and size like today's
| football pitch etc. People today like to play or watch sports,
| why wouldn't the ancient people like that too?
| kijin wrote:
| The distinction between sport and ritual human sacrifice
| isn't quite clear when it comes to this part of the world.
|
| But who are we kidding, the Romans also built massive
| structures where they could watch people kill one another
| and/or get eaten by lions. The shape of _those_ structures
| can definitely still be seen in the design of modern football
| stadiums.
| stardenburden wrote:
| They do! I visited "El Mirador" in the forest of Guatemala.
| And at one of the smaller cities on our way there, our guide
| pointed out that one of the small squares in, what was our
| entrance to, the town was probably used for playing a game
| similar to basketball but with a hard rock. There were also
| elevated places around it where people (albeit smaller in
| size) could have comfortably sit down and watched.
|
| Edit: autocorrect is messing me up
| WalterGR wrote:
| Lidar reveals hundreds of long-lost Maya and Olmec ceremonial
| centers (https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/lidar-reveals-
| hundre...)
|
| 104 points|samizdis|7 days ago|12 comments
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29048229
| icambron wrote:
| > Some of the sites are oriented to align to the sunrise on
| certain dates in Mesoamerican calendars, suggesting the ritual
| processes involved cosmological concepts tied to the movements of
| the seasons
|
| I always wonder how justified these inferences are. If future
| archeologists discover the ruins of, say, MIT's Infinite
| Corridor, will they conclude that it was a ceremonial site for
| the winter solstice? Obviously archeologists have additional
| historic context to feed these inferences, but you do have to
| wonder about the degree to which highly-visible and naturally
| enduring-- but possibly superficial and culturally unimportant--
| features of these sites lead to skewed conclusions.
| deniscepko2 wrote:
| well it kind of make sense due to the fact that people used to
| look up much more. i suggest you travel outside of light
| pollution and at night you will see what ancient people saw.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Yeah, for starters it actually has to coincide with winter
| solstice, which is not January 31 or November 11.
| Iv wrote:
| An historian friend once told me that whenever you see
| "ritualistic" or "religious reasons" mentioned in archeology
| publications it basically means "we have no fucking clue why
| they did that".
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| Well, many ancient structures align with sunrise on Equinox:
| the day where the earth is perfectly aligned with the sun and
| not tilted (that is: neither hemisphere is closer to the sun
| than the other). This is the exact middle day between the
| longest day of the year and the shortest day of the year.
|
| Others have a similar alignment on summer Solstice or winter
| solstice (the longest and shortest day of the year
| respectively)
|
| It _may_ be a coincidence, but I don't think any modern
| building has a window on both sides of the building where the
| sun rises on summer solstice and shines straight through both
| windows. If we do have any such buildings, I'm fairly certain
| it's by design.
|
| OTOH, there's some ruins where it aligns with sunrise on _some_
| random day, and that just feels like a coincidence. Like
| dropping a pencil on the floor and claiming the direction in
| which it points has some special meaning -- if you look hard
| enough, you'll find a meaning to give to it.
| wlll wrote:
| For those interested in these sort of things I highly recommend
| the incredibly well done Fall of Civilisations podcast:
| https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/, there is an episode on
| the Maya civilisations.
| novaRom wrote:
| Probably the best book on this topic is The Great Divide:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13426005-the-great-divid...
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| I firmly believe that one day we will find out the ancient world
| has a much bigger and overarching story than is currently known.
| And it will blow your mind. The Korean-Tamil hypothesis comes to
| mind.
| ink_13 wrote:
| > The Korean-Tamil hypothesis comes to mind
|
| This one doesn't seem to have a lot behind it. There are a
| handful of nice coincidences, but that's all.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Any museum will show you that the ancient world was very big
| and very interconnected.
|
| And Mayans are positively modern by the ancient timelines (e.g.
| Egypt is more ancient).
| peter303 wrote:
| Thats a part of the Greaber hypothesis in his new book The Dawn
| of Everything. He says anthropologists have had a too
| simplistic view of prehistory and people were more
| sophisticated than pop history gives them credit for.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| The Dravido-Koreanic hypothesis is probably a bad example as
| it's considered to be complete quackery by pretty much everyone
| who studies language. It was first suggested in 1905 and was
| based off the Turanian language hypothesis, which was found to
| be completely incorrect long ago.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| The thing that many modern people believe (incorrectly), is
| that primitive folks are not as smart as more developed people.
|
| They are every bit as smart (some might say, "smarter"); they
| just don't have the social, physical, and logical
| infrastructure, or access to resources, that more developed
| societies have.
|
| I think that was the premise of _Guns, Germs and Steel_.
| soared wrote:
| This is a pleasant thought but unfortunately it is factually
| incorrect. People today are in fact smarter than people of
| the past.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
| bangkoksbest wrote:
| Intelligence is a quality describing psychological and
| cognitive ability. It doesn't sit on some hidden one-
| dimensional quantitative scale as given in the half-assed
| pseudostatistic known as IQ. That you're asserting as fact
| an open ended extrapolation of IQ tests onto people living
| in entirely different circumstances centuries ago is pretty
| ironic.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| You ever read _Guns, Germs and Steel_? It 's a somewhat
| controversial book, but it has some fascinating
| discussions.
|
| The intro says it all. Jared Diamond is a damn smart
| cookie. I don't know if he still works there, but he used
| to be a Harvard professor, so he hung out with a lot of
| smart cookies.
|
| He wrote the book, because he was hanging out with New
| Guinea hunter-gatherers (I believe they hunted and gathered
| heads).
|
| He realized that a lot of these folks were every bit as
| smart as his peers, and wanted to find out why they didn't
| come out of the scrum as a more advanced society.
| pixl97 wrote:
| You are only as capable as the society around you. Maybe that
| is something the rugged individualists among us should take
| to note.
| oliv__ wrote:
| If that were true, there would never be any progress.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| We wouldn't have a civilization with out the pioneering
| work of individuals.
|
| Individualism and collectivism are tightly woven together.
| Both are needed, its a mistake to think that you can have
| one without the other.
|
| And actually many of the pioneering individuals had to
| transcend the boundaries of collectivism to actual make the
| world better. Tesla comes to mind.
| colordrops wrote:
| Sure, I don't think the comment you are responding to is
| advocating for pure collectivism though, just speaking to
| those who completely reject any aspects of it.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| https://www.amazon.com/s?k=graham+hancock
|
| is Graham Hancock, who has written several famous books about
| the questions of what the loss of the library at Alexandria, to
| fire, did to the current ideas of history.
| zokula wrote:
| Lol Graham Hancock is one of the biggest frauds and a liars.
| Artistry121 wrote:
| Evidence?
| amar-laksh wrote:
| Try the dawn of everything by david graeber. It does show the
| vibrant nature of the historic and pre-historic world.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56269264-the-dawn-of-eve...
| cto_of_antifa wrote:
| yeah, I've been thinking a lot about this too. there's evidence
| that the inuit were actually the first people to develop an
| MRNA vaccine.
| fedreserved wrote:
| Go down the Robert sepehr (has a channel on youtube) rabbit
| hole my friend. He's an anthropologist who has connected the
| dots in an interesting way if true.
| aww_dang wrote:
| If nothing else his content generally stimulates my
| imagination.
| [deleted]
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Or read "A Story Waiting to Pierce You" by classical scholar
| Peter Kingsley.
|
| He gives evidence for shamanic influences at the origin of
| western civilization, namely through the friendship of Abaris
| and Pythagoras. Abaris was from the Steppes--and potentially
| from as far as Mongolia. He then speculates further about the
| shared cultural lineage between the Americas, which was
| populated by the steppe people circa up to 10k BCE, and the
| emergence of complex society around the Black Sea. A lot of
| speculation but all grounded in well-cited evidence. A short
| but fun read.
| fedreserved wrote:
| You would definitely enjoy the Robert sepehr rabbit hole.
| He hits on what you described and a whole lot more.
| Watching him, I'm like how is this information not more
| widely known. But I never have the time to do independent
| digging, to confirm or deny his research. But super
| entertaining.
| oblib wrote:
| I've been to a few dozen sites there over the 3 trips I've taken
| to the Yucatan area.
|
| I climbed a pyramid in Guatemala a few years ago on a trip there
| and chatted with the park rangers there. At first they were kinda
| of standoffish, which is common, but I learned that when I took
| out my little "Spanish for Dummies" handbook and cracked a joke
| about me needing it they'd laughed and warm up to me. Being
| humble made an amazing difference.
|
| It can get pretty hot there during our winter months here in the
| US when I went there and I finally realized just a few days
| before at a different site on that trip that on all of my trips
| the one thing in common when you climb those is a wonderfully
| refreshing and cooling breeze, whereas in the forest below them
| it was hot and muggy, and I mentioned that to those Mayan Park
| rangers.
|
| They instantly became excited to talk to me about that. They told
| me that is exactly why they were built and what they were used
| for, and emphatically pointed out they were not built for
| "chopping off their enemies heads" like the archeologists that
| come from the US and Europe like to opine and imagine they were
| used for.
|
| I was kind of shocked by that, and their disdain for those
| foreign archeologists that keep saying they were, which they made
| very clear to me.
|
| I got fairly well torched the last time I mentioned this here but
| I think it's important to share because it's so easy to overlook.
| I overlooked it for quite a long time myself.
|
| Just a few years ago my wife and visited the Chokia site near St.
| Louis, MO on a vicious hot and humid summer day and it's there
| too. So you don't have to go to the Yucatan to experience that
| wonderful cooling breeze on a pyramid because climbing that big
| mound offers the same cool breezy relief, and it's undeniably
| there while just below it is not.
|
| Now... to put this into proper prospective you have to spend some
| time below those pyramids working a bit. Working up a sweat for a
| few hours in the sun like real labor does for you. Then go climb
| that mound. It's the equivalent to modern A/C.
|
| The Mayans will tell you that's why they were built. It's fair to
| say some were modified over the years to be more ceremonial, like
| Uxmal for example, but all around even that one are many lesser
| structures with perfect places to sit and refresh in the cool
| breeze to be found on them.
|
| If you go to Tulum you'll notice that in the parking lot it's hot
| and humid and the air is dead still and there are no tall
| structures anywhere. But if you walk to the edge of the cliff
| overlooking the ocean you'll find the cooling breeze. They didn't
| need a tall structure there. That was where they took their work
| breaks.
|
| We need to update our take on those because that is too common
| and too easy to prove and it's what the Mayans themselves say is
| the reason those structures were built.
| akomtu wrote:
| "estimated to date from around 1,050-400 BCE, and are thought to
| have been used as ritual spaces, where people gathered to meet,
| and to watch processions"
|
| In this sentence there are 0 facts and 4 brazen speculations.
|
| Edit. Although I agree with at least one speculation:
|
| "they were representing cosmological ideas through these
| ceremonial spaces"
| lokimedes wrote:
| That is the state of archeology. When thinking about how hard
| it is to make anthropology and sociology "proper" sciences even
| today with social media as datasets - just consider how hard
| solving the same problem, inversely, based on whatever scraps
| survived today is.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| Did you read the underlying research? That might explain why
| they think this.
| hasmanean wrote:
| Agreed. Every culture has invented A central plaza surrounded
| by buildings...the only cosmological idea it embodies is that
| "tall tightly packed buildings block the wind."
|
| Ours is the civilization in history to build urban wind
| canyons, buildings with wide open roads between them. We also
| have less people occupying those spaces than even moderately
| sized European towns.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Knowing little about this, I wonder would it change how we
| thought about these if we didn't call everything ceremonial and
| ritual? It's like it's to put some kind of figleaf over these
| people other people who were probably a lot like us.
|
| I suppose my reaction is that popular archeological articles seem
| to effectively defy economics as a force in their explanations,
| and seem to prefer treating the cultures as being under an
| impaired superstition about the world.
|
| It seems like uncovering a stadium, airport, or the Washington
| Mall from our world today and saying it was for rituals and
| ceremonies, which sure, abstractly it is, but it seems a bit
| filtered through a lens of studying them as primitive pagans.
| Nobody shifts hundreds of tons of rock for being seized by
| astrological magic.
|
| If you start with the loop of necessity that nothing is ever more
| than it needs to be, we can bootstrap the question of for what
| was this necessary? It's even more plausible to say pyramids were
| the product of a policy of Ancient Keynesianism, than to treat
| megalithic builders as primitive. Maybe I'm just as curious as
| archeologists are, but if we applied how mystified some modern
| academics can seem about trade and economics today and then apply
| that back to studying ancient cultures, I'd wonder if there were
| some opportunities to reduce some blind spots.
| kingkawn wrote:
| I think your associations with the word ritual are too limited.
| It isn't just paganism, but all ceremonial behaviors that serve
| symbolic cultural functions. Stadiums included.
| Izkata wrote:
| On this point: What they've uncovered here looks to me kinda
| like a jousting field [0]. The raised line in the center
| separates the running area of the two opponents' horses, though
| some of them are too far off-center and the hump next to the
| line would be a bit of a mystery.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jousting
| andrewflnr wrote:
| While it's likely that not everything we label as "for ritual
| purposes" was exactly that, I think you're hugely
| underestimating the force of religion. Think about all the huge
| temples and cathedrals that have been built just in the western
| world. You don't think Mesoamericans felt the same impulse?
| "Seized by astrological magic" is framing the question with a
| putdown that distorts your understanding. You can't predict the
| actions of ancient people with a modern mindset about astrology
| in particular or religion in general. To them, these ideas were
| very real and important.
|
| If you read a tiny bit more broadly in pop archaeology, it's
| clear that they're trying their best to find economic reasons
| for things. It's a bit insulting to insinuate they jump
| straight to "ritual purposes" without considering more mundane
| reasons.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Think about all the huge temples
|
| _ancient_ temples. Modern _temples_ look more like shopping
| malls or other large buildings than the ornate buildings of
| old.
| motohagiography wrote:
| It's not a putdown at all, other than perhaps to a modern
| intelligentsia who would see, say, the NFL as a ritual
| instead of a complex economic organization, of which what we
| perceive externally as ritual is the least meaningful
| explanation for a vast economic machine.
|
| Cathedrals are another example, where the Catholic church was
| mainly a vast economic and political colonial machine driven
| by economics and power, and churches established territory,
| merely under the convenience of state religion.
|
| When you design any structure, form follows function, and
| function follows economy, which in turn has necessary
| conditions, like shortest distances, water, waste, an average
| 1500 kcal/person/day, security for families and offspring,
| what kind of costs to impose on invaders, a contract and
| accounting system for future delivery of goods and promises,
| credit for crops, tools for leverage, architecture that is
| the expression of all of it.
|
| When we say ritual now, it implies sympathetic magic. The
| scientific method is not a ritual, nor is proving theorems,
| or using geometry to engineer things. These were human
| civilizations and my point is we might learn more about them
| faster if we didn't start with the premise they were
| superstitious and lacked political and economic agency. Sure,
| if one thinks all religions are equally nonsensical and its
| role is at best a noble lie, then an ancient one might also
| be that, but if it's a way to encode and transmit knowledge
| robustly and sustainably in a culture, I'd argue they were
| probably more like us than we think when we say they're doing
| rituals.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Maybe we're mostly in agreement? I certainly agree that
| ancient people were very similar to us, and that religion
| can have value by transmitting knowledge. But religions,
| almost any social meme complex, tend to have a lot of
| nonsense closely entwined with the beneficial payload. So
| when people act it out as a whole, it can have some really
| goofy side effects, like cathedrals (the details of what's
| inside, if not the brute fact of its location). You can't
| treat the ritual separate from its practical implications,
| because in the minds of people they derive from the same
| logical source, and if you try to take just the parts you
| like you'll actually be acting inconsistently with your
| supposed beliefs. Separating the good from the bogus at
| scale apparently takes centuries at best.
|
| I guess maybe you're saying we should try harder to find
| the economic purposes under the apparently ritual
| artifacts? Maybe. I'm honestly pretty sure that's assumed
| in practice. I bet if you talked to an archaeologist on the
| project and raised a similar point to your point about
| cathedrals, they would say something like "Hmm? Yes, of
| course it was something like that." But even if we get
| enough evidence to figure out the economic or political
| role these sites played, my guess is the religious or other
| ritual aspects will not go away.
|
| As for our modern perspective, assuming that ancient people
| were superstitious is a completely natural extrapolation
| from watching ourselves, even if that's not where the
| assumption comes from in practice. Math is pretty solid,
| and the platonic ideal of science but science as practiced
| today too often is a ritual, or we wouldn't have all these
| replication crises and junk COVID papers.
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| What's a little odd to me is we don't call it "rituals" when
| applied to modern people, we call it "religious services".
|
| "Rituals" does have a bit of a connotation beyond religion
| don't you think?
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Sure, we tend to forget that things like Independence Day
| fireworks are also modern rituals. I don't see how that's
| super relevant to my original point, though? Religion is
| not the only ritual system, but it does seem to be the one
| with the most consistent track record of inciting huge non-
| economically-motivated resource expenditures (at least
| superficially; the economic impact of social cohesion is
| one of small-change-in-the-exponent things that's easy to
| underestimate). Anyway, I really just wanted to push back
| on the idea that "ritual purposes" is an implausible
| explanation for these kinds of things.
| jhgb wrote:
| Maybe that's the point. Unlike with today's people, you
| can't know for sure the intentions behind archeological
| finds. Calling something "ritualistic" in archeology seems
| more likely to be correct, as not all social rituals are
| religious in nature.
| andnasnd wrote:
| I'm partially trained in anthropology and would love to
| provide some insight. While terms like 'ritual' and
| 'ceremonial' certainly indicate religious undertones, they
| are delineated in an anthropological context.
|
| For example, an anthro operational definition for 'ritual'
| would be "actions with intentional symbolic meaning
| undertaken for a specific cultural purpose", where the
| cultural purpose could be childhood development (rites of
| adulthood), religious as previously mentioned, or perhaps
| just a fun activity within the society.
|
| I say all of this but understand that this article isn't
| necessarily geared towards only anthropologists, and
| operational definitions may be in order. Just my 2cents
| d0mine wrote:
| "an impaired superstition about the world." it is still a
| pretty accurate description of the current affairs.
| vram22 wrote:
| >Nobody shifts hundreds of tons of rock for being seized by
| astrological magic.
|
| Sez who?
|
| Maybe just you.
|
| ;)
|
| Egyptian pyramids, for example.
|
| Ellora Caves, for another, at least for the "hundreds of tons
| of rock" part.
|
| I can mention more.
|
| And anyway, in ancient India, religion, astrology, rituals,
| sculpture, temple-building a.k.a. religious architecture,
| dance, music, song, even cooking / food, medicine and healing,
| were all interlinked and blended into one harmonious whole.
| Linked by a sort of analogue of the holy grail of physics, the
| grand unified theory of everything. I don't know if there is a
| specific single name for that or not, but I can mention many
| traditional terms that give clear pointers, if anyone is
| interested.
|
| Stonehenge, too.
|
| (Edited.)
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| FWIW, a lot of our structures are basically for rituals.
|
| Large stadiums are for spectators to observe the best football
| players as part of yearly ceremonial games.
|
| Certain parks are for ceremonial gatherings on certain time of
| years, where we put traditional ritual ornaments (e.g.:
| christmas decoration).
|
| It's just the OUR rituals have names and we don't think of them
| as rituals, but we have plenty of things that are ritualistic
| and ceremonial: the olypmics, new year, halloween, easter,
| friday drinks at the office, birthday parties, etc.
| varelse wrote:
| Indeed: the Nacirema are a strange people.
|
| https://www.sfu.ca/~palys/Miner-1956-BodyRitualAmongTheNacir.
| ..
| mro_name wrote:
| and most datacenters are. A lot of accounting is. PR mostly
| is.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| yes, giant blocks of silicon to divine the future
| Haga wrote:
| But that's the running gag in archeology? If you don't know
| it's purpose it's for r&c
| HahaReally wrote:
| "Pagan" as a word is used to mean "non-Christian", which in
| modern times, doesn't really carry any weight in terms of what
| you're saying about their practices. Christians are more than
| happy to insist they have some sort of religion that is "more
| advanced" while simultaneously being /historically recorded/ as
| having acted violent, cruel, callous, and superstitious to
| anything outside of what their parents and community told them
| was "religion", and this only carries over to the printing
| press being used as the means by which to disseminate their
| poison. Your ideas of religion are backward and given to you by
| the sellers of poison for the soul.
| drawqrtz wrote:
| I would have loved to live in ancient Maya or Aztec times.
| Playing ollamalitzli with the boys, cracking open some cocoa, in
| the evening watch a proper offering to the sun god. Maybe a bit
| more violent and shorter than modern life but definitely more
| exciting.
| bregma wrote:
| I hate to sprinkle blow on your parade, but coca was a
| different civilization 3000 miles and a few centuries away from
| both the Maya and the Aztecs. The only thing they have in
| common is they or their descendents eventually had their
| history erased by Spanish colonizers in the name of
| "civilization".
| Panoramix wrote:
| OP wrote cocoa, not coca
| ianhawes wrote:
| I find it ironic that the Spanish get a bad rap for
| "colonizing" the Mayans, but all the evidence suggests the
| Mayan civilization was committing genocide and ethnic
| cleansing.
|
| Modern day countries participating in human sacrifice and
| mass murder would similarly be invaded and the history of
| their actions would be altered. See: Germany in WW2.
| juanani wrote:
| When in Rome... I doubt commiting genocide or ethnic
| cleansing was new to anyone back then, so you claim Spain
| 'liberated' these people? Sounds like a nice nitpick
| written by the victora. So easy to lap it up when the world
| is black n white. Please stop watching MCU/Star Wars
| xvilka wrote:
| There are many places where mass murder happens right now
| yet nobody is even contemplating their invasion. It happens
| only when there is something to take, something precious.
| elnatro wrote:
| Well two countries were invaded by USA after 11-S. At
| that moment both invasions were sold to the public as
| justified, because "security" and "for the people living
| there".
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| think of the honor if you could actually be a proper offering
| to the sun god!
| mtgx wrote:
| Being offered to the sun god - Achievement Unlocked!
| konart wrote:
| Many places in the world can offer you such life even now. Yet
| you are writing it from a cozy sofa or something.
| jl6 wrote:
| There are plenty of ways to inject violence and excitement into
| modern life if that's what you're missing!
| dunefox wrote:
| Don't threaten me with a good time.
| shrumm wrote:
| I know this isn't the spirit of your comment but this is one of
| the use cases of VR that I'm most looking forward to.
|
| We've invested a LOT into immersing people into past worlds -
| think Jurassic park for dinosaurs, plenty of TV and movies
| about Roman times etc. VR would make all that seem so dated and
| boring.
|
| Work up a sweat running from a T-Rex - quick shower and off to
| work!
| d3nj4l wrote:
| Defile what I defile! Eat who I eat!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEMbLt4B4iA
| jjk166 wrote:
| Actually the first time I ever used a VR headset it was a
| program that put you in the dinosaur era. There were some
| triceratopses and hadrosaurs walking around in front of me,
| then I heard a branch snap behind me, I turned my head and
| saw a Tyrannosaurus and it was legit the scariest experience
| of my life. The graphics weren't even that high quality, but
| I don't think my flight or fight response takes the time to
| measure a predator's polygon count.
| L_226 wrote:
| You may enjoy the Transformation series by Neal Asher.
|
| A non-significant plot detail involves organisms being fitted
| with neural capture devices to record full sensory stimuli,
| before being killed/eaten by other organisms. These neural
| recordings are then sold to wealthy buyers who want to
| experience novelty.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| That is also the premise behind a 1983 film called
| Brainstorm starring Christopher Walken.
| stareatgoats wrote:
| Looking forward to that day too. And if I may add another
| wish; that it becomes routine to be able immerse oneself in
| the ideas and culture of that time too. I realize that it is
| presently both easier and appeals to a larger audience to
| simply project our own ideas and culture onto past settings.
| But who knows what the future will bring. One can hope.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Feels like a good place to visit, not live. My sneaking
| suspicion is that subsistance farming feels pretty similar no
| matter what century and empire you do it in, and that's the
| boring stuff that doesn't make it into the history books.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "Feels like a good place to visit, not live. "
|
| I am pretty sure if you came "to visit" aka a tourist, you
| likely would not have lived too long there to settle down.
|
| Unless you brought some modern day magic, like a gun or a
| smartphone, to convince them you are send from the gods and
| not to be sacrificed just yet.
|
| They literally murdered babies regulary. Why would one want
| to visit those, except for hardcore anthropologic studies?
|
| And subsistence farming probably did differ, depending how
| far away the next empire was. Some lived in total slavery and
| dependency and some quite undisturbed pretty much on their
| own (there are some villages in remote greece areas for
| example, claiming to never have been conquered.).
| h2odragon wrote:
| We're giants, with no scars and no disfigurations. Wouldn't
| that be enough magic? Most of us are utterly ignorant of
| the most basic skills that would be universal in such
| times; further evidence that we must be if not Gods then
| the swaddled products of some form of divine grace.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| They believed everything is magic and from the gods. And
| the priests interpreted the signs. So yeah, maybe the
| signs said for you to be treated as a king. And then to
| be sacrificed the next day. A special sacrifice.
| politician wrote:
| > They literally murdered babies regulary.
|
| We're going to collectively suppress discussion about this
| statement.
| dunefox wrote:
| Why? I certainly won't.
| politician wrote:
| Fantastic result. Just as predicted-- there is no
| acceptable way to engage with this comment on HN.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| sir, this is a technology forum
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Because it's factually incorrect. The Maya didn't have a
| particularly notable tradition of infanticide and they
| weren't common sacrifices.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Ah yes, the Maya did not have the tradition like the inca
| to bury 100 human and lamita babies alive on solstice.
| And I am not an expert in the various rites of human
| sacrifice. But what I understand is, that a sacrifice is
| more powerful, if the sacrifice is more valuable.
|
| So if this was the norm:
|
| "Some other sacrifice related practices include burning
| victims alive, dancing in the skin of a skinned victim,
| taking head trophies, cannibalism, drinking a deceased
| relative's bathwater, and sprinkling sacrificial blood
| around sanctuaries"
|
| then the only reason for them to not sacrifice babies
| regulary (but I am pretty sure they did so on occasion,
| too) would be, if they would not deem them worthy enough.
| So my point kind of still stands: why would you want to
| visit such folks?
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Then why did you? Did you expect a nuanced discussion
| from your statement?
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| I think there's some romanticization going on, which is
| fine to an extent.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| Pre-Columbian farming in South/Central America was
| substantially less labor-intense than in Europe and Asia
| because maize has an intrinsically higher yield in terms of
| calories per unit labor.
|
| The downside is that maize isn't as nutritious as wheat or
| rice and needs to be more heavily supplemented with proper
| protein from meat or pulses - or the human being becomes
| malnourished.
|
| >Easily obtained, what is more, for maize has always been a
| crop that demands little effort. The archaeologist Fernando
| Marquez Miranda has given us an excellent account of the
| advantages enjoyed by peasants cultivating maize: it required
| them to work only fifty days in the year, one day in seven or
| eight, according to season. They were therefore free, perhaps
| a little too free. The maize-growing societies on the
| irrigated terraces of the Andes or on the lakesides of the
| Mexican plateaux resulted in theocratic totalitarian systems
| and all the leisure of the peasants was used for gigantic
| public works of the Egyptian type. (It is arguable whether
| the cause was indeed maize, or irrigation, or the dense
| population of societies which became oppressive from sheer
| weight of numbers.)[One]
|
| [One]https://archive.org/details/BraudelFernandCivilizationAn
| dCap... p161
| abrowne wrote:
| On the other hand, the physical labor of grinding the
| kernels into meal, done by women kneeling at large mortar
| and pestle like tool, was intense and visible in skeletal
| remains.
| koheripbal wrote:
| With no animals to help and no wheels... Every bit of soil
| had to be rolled by hand and every product carried by foot.
|
| ...it was most definitely worse than others.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Can you imagine the feeling of watching a human sacrifice in a
| crowd of 10,000 people? Or watching the king pierce his own
| penis with a stingray spine? The blood! And still-beating
| hearts! The collective empathy induced by these powerful
| experiences, specifically the _affective resonance_ , would be
| a powerful binding force. Especially when combined with the
| pounding music and (occasionally) psychedelics [1].
|
| Wikipedia has a nice article on Mayan human sacrifice [2]. It
| all sounds so brutal, but then again, so is Squid Game.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entheogenics_and_the_Maya
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Maya_cultur...
| oblib wrote:
| We still have capital punishment so, yeah.
|
| I'll offer that was probably not any more common in Mayan
| life than ours now and those glyphs and stories are a sort of
| example used to keep folks in check or aggrandize the rulers
| of the day and in regards to those not much has changed.
| goldenManatee wrote:
| Cannot compute, mind overload, lol
| idkwhoiam wrote:
| Sounds cool until it's your turn to sacrifice yourself to the
| sun god
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