Right!
I like how the Nat Geo and others make Maya out to be SO advanced and superior to our culture.
I mean these guys were doing human, and blood sacrifice along with some other REAL WEIRD and brutal things, all WHILE purifying their f’n drinking water! It was all being done centuries AFTER the birth of Christ... so.... how ‘advanced’ were they?
should have been inventing gun powder. too busy ripping peoples hearts out I guess.
They weren’t doing anything weirder or more brutal than Europeans. Europeans burned an associate of Martin Luther at the stake merely for a difference of opinion on a theological matter.
Administering a flogging so serious the victim could die from the wounds was common in colonial America.
Then there is keelhauling... for those in the Navy.
Humanity is pretty rotten throughout the world; no one has a monopoly on evil, no one can really brag about being above it.
The West purified our water by making beer out of it. Breakfast beer a very low ABV and the ABV rose during the day.
So they essentially had Britta water and we had beer. Who exactly got the better end of that deal?
Advanced astronomy and water filtration. Very impressive.
Yep nowhere in the Americas was a wheel to be found.
They’re not comparing the Maya to our culture, they’re comparing them to the other ancient cultures of the world. Many of the Mayan finds are new because of the use of Lidar and geophysics. It wasn’t known until recently just how extensive and ancient the Mayan civilization was.
As somebody pointed out, brutality was pretty common in the ancient world on every continent. Human sacrifice was practiced in Europe and Asia. Other forms of killing were common. Nobody says the ancient Romans weren’t a great civilization because they commonly murdered babies.
Those Native Americans were no more brutal than a lot of the rulers of Europe at the time-various methods of torturing political prisoners and criminals alike to death, burning supposed witches, having rebels hanged, drawn and quartered-doesn’t sound civilized to me-the world was a more savage place then-my ancestors left Spain for what is now Mexico starting in the 16th century, so they obviously thought it was safer to take their chances living in a wilderness around people who dispatched enemies by ripping out their hearts and practiced other forms of blood sacrifice than living in Spain where they could be imprisoned and slowly tortured to death because some noble wanted to shut them up just for the hell of it. My DNA says some of my ancestors bred with those savages, too-so...
Now I will go sharpen my obsidian knife and pick out a Karen from the nearest town-dia de los muertos is only a few days away...
not to mention large-scale slavery.
Although there are several hundred volcanoes in China/Mongolia/Tibet, Europeans wouldn’t know much about volcanic rock for filtering because they were exposed to so few volcanos. Same for the eastern seaboard of the USA. OTOH, California, home to 20 volcanos, New Mexico with 12, Arizona with 6 are included in the about 170 volcanoes in 12 American states active in the past 12,000 years. Guatamala with 35 volcanoes, 15 in Costa Rica, 21 in Nicaragua, 20 in El Salvador, and 45 or so in Mexico gave those living on the western seaboard much more exposure to and experience with volcanic tuff.
Did the Mayans get the specifics of the minerals or did they just notice that water that flowed from or over the rock-sponge tuff was clear of algae and tasted better? The tuff would have to be constantly dredged out and replenished tho, for the same reasons our home water filters need replacing - the pores clog over time. And if the clogged material remained in place, what clogged it would just leach out, now in a concentrated form. So what did they do with the dredged material?
https://www.tripsavvy.com/list-of-central-america-volcanoes-1491002
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volcanoes_in_China