15-Year-Old Boy Discovers Hidden Mayan City - AskMen
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      15-Year-Old Boy Discovers Hidden Mayan City

      Trending News: How Did A Teen Discover A Hidden Mayan City On His Own?

      Why Is This Important?

      Because the world still contains some undiscovered wonders.

      Long Story Short

      A 15-year-old boy from Quebec used Mayan star charts and satellite imagery to find an abandoned Mayan city in Belize.

      Long Story

      William Gadoury has been fascinated by the Mayans ever since the claim that the world was going to end in 2012 (remember that?). So much so that he spent his free time analyzing the location of over 100 known Mayan cities and the constellations that he believed the ancient civilization used for city planning.

      “I couldn’t understand why the Mayans built their cities far from rivers, on land that wasn’t very fertile or mountainous,” he told the Journal de Montréal.

      He believed that the Mayans built their cities based on the locations of stars in almost two dozen constellations. So when he overlayed a star chart on a map of the Yucatan peninsula, covering parts of southern Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, his hypothesis was proved correct: the biggest Mayan cities corresponded to the brightest stars in those constellations.


      But Gadoury noticed something was missing.

      There was no corresponding city where a star in one constellation indicated there should have been. Gadoury came to the discovery when he correlated the position of 117 Mayan cities to the stars in 23 constellations. But he realized that one three-star constellation only had two corresponding cities, and deduced there must be one city still undiscovered. According to his calculations, the missing city should be somewhere in Belize.

      And so, using imagery from NASA, the Japanese space agency JAXA, the Canadian Space Agency and Google Earth, Gadoury found evidence of a pyramid and some 30 or so other structures. That’s no small find: it’s believed it may be among the five biggest Mayan cities of all time.

      The boy has called the site K’aak Chi, “Mouth of Fire.” It has yet to be explored on land — these things take time and money to do properly — but the Mexican archaeologists Gadoury contacted about his discovery have promised to take him with them when they do eventually investigate it. “That would be the culmination of three years of work and my life’s dream,” he told the newspaper.


      We'll wait for the final verdict, however, when archaeologists visit the site.

      Own The Conversation

      Ask The Big Question: Isn’t it amazing what a kid with brains, drive and imagination can do?

      Disrupt Your Feed: What’s the over/under on when this kid get his Ph.D?

      Drop This Fact: The Mayan civilization flourished from the mid-3rd century to about the 10th, after which it suffered a terminal decline due, it’s believed, by constant internal warfare, drought and overpopulation.

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