Free Our Cosmic Ancestors by Maurice Chatelain

calendar was accepted by the archaeologists with good reason to be 5,200 years, or 260 times 20 years, because the scientists were well aware of the fact that for the Mayas the numbers 13, 26, and 260 were very important. The short cycle, as everybody thought, had to be about 19.75 years, but nobody could explain why it had to be a number that does not correspond to any of the cyclic motions of either the Sun, the Moon, or any known planet or comet.
    When the radiocarbon dating method was introduced, the archaeologists were sure that in no time all the mysteries of the Mayan calendar would be solved. Carbon dating seemed tailor-made for this purpose because all Mayan temples had heavy wooden beams made from a tree called 'sapodilla', which has a rich latex content and does not rot. Also insects do not affect this evergreen which is now cultivated to produce chicle, the main ingredient of chewing gum. Furthermore, all inscriptions on Mayan temples mark the exact date according to the Mayan calendar when they were built.
    The Mayas used the vigesimal counting by 20, with a dash and dot system. The numbers were represented by an eye that had the value of zero, a dot that counted for 1, and a dash that counted for 5. As the carbon-dating system was thought to be at that time very reliable, all that supposedly had to be done to bring our calendar and the unknown Mayan calendar into accord was to take a sliver of
sapodilla wood from the beam of the temple, find out by its radioactive carbon content how old it was, and then compare its age with the inscribed Mayan date on the lintel of the temple.
    In the middle of the tropical jungle of Guatemala stands the magnificent Mayan temple of Tikal built in a year indicated thus: one dash four dots three dashes two dashes one eye and one more eye - which in our numbers would mean 9 15 10 0 0 or the Mayan year nine baktuns, fifteen katuns, ten tuns, zero months, zero days, or about 3,900 of our years since the last start of the Mayan long calendar.
    The Spinden team estimated this date to be AD 481, but the Thompson team insisted that it was the year AD 741. Carbon dating was to resolve the dispute and everybody went down to Tikal to obtain fresh samples of the old temple lintel for the laboratory where it was to be tested by the newest, most precise methods of radiocarbon dating.
    The first results obtained from burning the Tikal sapodilla slivers indicated that the Spinden group was right, but later tests with a greater number of samples proved finally that the Thompson group was the winner. All were satisfied because each team had won one set of the match, but the mystery of the Mayan calendar was not solved. As we will see later on, the real winner was the Thompson team that came very close to the right answer - the year 739 or two years less than 741 that they had proposed.
    The most amusing aspect was that this astonishingly precise prediction was obtained from a wrong starting date and a wrong short cycle. A similar case in history is the precise calculation by Eratosthenes of Alexandria who 2,200 years ago established the circumference of our planet by using two wrong values whose errors cancelled each other and thus yielded the right answer.
    I had long been intrigued by the mysteries of the Mayan calendar but never had the time to take a closer look. Then, after a dinner date in Paris with a French specialist in Mayan culture, I decided to try the impossible. I knew that the Mayas, like the Sumerians, were great astronomers and I had long suspected the two cultures had something in common.
The Mayas also knew of the precession of the equinoxes and the existence of Uranus and Neptune. They had calculated the periods of revolution and conjunction of different planets and discovered, as I already mentioned, some equivalent astronomical cycles, such as 65 revolutions of Venus which are equal to 104 solar years, or 327 revolutions of Mercury. They also used the cycle of 33,968 days to