alt Hacker NewsThe sad thing is that for all their advanced ways of the time, they succumbed to the same thing we are experiencing now... being too comfortable to fix what's broken.
The Mayans did not want to give up their lifestyles even in the face of crippling population growth and surrounding natural resource depletion... which led to their downfall.
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t1E9mE7JTRjf • yesterday at 7:58 AM
Sounds like the opposite no? Since we are going through population collapse in a time of abundance. Does make me wonder what the political dynamics were at the time, whether some could see problems but weren't in power to change things. Or maybe they couldn't understand or figure out solutions to the problems. What I'd give to be a multilingual fly on the wall throughout history.
This should be upvoted. A lot. The downvotes are ill-informed.
https://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/77060/mayan-def...
From newish imaging. We can see the impressions of vast jungle swaths cut down and way made for planting food and houses. This looks to have disrupted the water cycle enough to cause cinotes (underground water systems and only source of drinking water) to deplete. We see sacrificial remnants below the modern water line. Their water disappeared and so did their civilization. By the time the Spanish arrived, the local people had no knowledge of how to build nor maintain their now ancient cities, the jungles regrew, water came back, and sacrificial artifacts were covered by replenished water levels.
They are an example of man made effects on local weather leading to the downfall of an advanced civilization.