Interesting History News Of 2018: Researchers Finally Uncover What Wiped Out The Mayans
Laslovarga/Wikimedia CommonsTikal, an ancient Mayan city that dates from 800 B.C. to 900 A.D.
For centuries researchers have tried to discover exactly how the Mayan civilization could have fallen apart so quickly. This year, history news made, well, history, with this discovery.
A new report in Science, released on August 3, has finally given quantifiable evidence confirming the most widely-believed theory to explain how the Mayan civilization met its end: drought.
The key to unlocking the mystery ended up being located in Lake Chichancanab on the Yucatan Peninsula. For the report, researchers examined oxygen and hydrogen isotopes in sediment from the lake, which was close enough to the heart of Mayan civilization to provide an accurate sample of the climate.
Nicholas Evans, a Cambridge University research student and co-author of the paper, measured the isotopic composition of water found in the lake’s sediment to quantify exactly how much precipitation rates fell during the end of the Mayan civilization.
Evans concluded that annual rainfall levels declined 41 to 54 percent in the area surrounding the lake for several long periods over roughly 400 years, according to IFLScience.
Josh Giovo/Wikimedia CommonsRuins of a Mayan temple.
The report also revealed that humidity in the area dropped by 2 to 7 percent. These two factors combined had to have had a devastating effect on the civilization’s agricultural production.
Because these drought conditions occurred frequently over hundreds of years, the civilization must not have been able to build up food reserves enough to make up for the drop in agricultural production, eventually leading to their demise.
Matthew Lachinet, a professor in geosciences at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, who was not involved in the study, told the Washington Post that this study is impactful because it offers insights into how humans can change the climate around them.
“Humans are affecting climate,” Lachinet said. “We’re making it warmer and it’s projected to become drier in Central America. What we could end up with is double-whammy of drought. If you coincide drying from natural causes with drying from human causes, then it amplified the strength of that drought.”
Indeed, this history news has informed our future.
