2012 Doomsday isn't a concern... An expert says the belief that ancient Mayans predicted the world will end Dec. 21, 2012, has one problem: The Mayans said no such thing. The prospect of apocalypse now or at least in three years and a bit has spawned enough books to stock a small library, television documentaries and now a movie. The belief in the Mayan prediction is based on the long-count calendar, which covers 5,000 years and ends on that date as near as anyone can tell.
But an anthropologist says the calendar was not intended as a predictor of doomsday or of giant tsunamis and earthquakes more destructive than anything in the historical or geological record.
"It's just like a car odometer. The calendar clicks over to a new set of numbers," Geoff Braswell, an anthropologist at the University of California at San Diego, told The San Diego Union-Tribune. "The Maya certainly didn't expect the world to end. They wrote about stuff happening 400 million years from now."
William Gladstone of Cardiff, Calif., has written a novel, "The Twelve," about the Mayan calendar. He told the newspaper he decided on a novel "because the story doesn't work as non-fiction."
Read more: http://www.thirdage.com/news/2012-doomsday-was-never-predicted-says-expert_10-21-2010#ixzz14nFKiIGV
But an anthropologist says the calendar was not intended as a predictor of doomsday or of giant tsunamis and earthquakes more destructive than anything in the historical or geological record.
"It's just like a car odometer. The calendar clicks over to a new set of numbers," Geoff Braswell, an anthropologist at the University of California at San Diego, told The San Diego Union-Tribune. "The Maya certainly didn't expect the world to end. They wrote about stuff happening 400 million years from now."
William Gladstone of Cardiff, Calif., has written a novel, "The Twelve," about the Mayan calendar. He told the newspaper he decided on a novel "because the story doesn't work as non-fiction."
Read more: http://www.thirdage.com/news/2012-doomsday-was-never-predicted-says-expert_10-21-2010#ixzz14nFKiIGV
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