The origin of the Mayas

THE ORIGIN OF THE MAYAS





Mayan kid

The first question that come to mind when we talk about a culture is "who they were?" or "where they come from?", archeologist started wondering about the Mayas, over than 150 years ago, and said the Mayas were colonies of Rome, Egiptians, Fenicians or Greeks, even the world paid attention when the author Erick Von Daniken during the 70's said: "The mayas came from outerspace" in his Best Seller book "Charriots of Gods", suggesting that the famous monolit covering the tumb of the Great Pakal, (leader of Palenque) was in reality an astronaut driving a space ship.
One more theory claims the Mayas came from "Atlantis" , a mythical civilization lost in the ocean. Today we know that the expression MAYA, is actually a combination of 2 words in the maya tongue still spoken in Yucatan Peninsula, MAY-HA, where MAY means footprint and HA stands for water, that seems to indicate that the original Mayas came from the ocean, but opens a debate about what kind of navegation they used and of course, where the ship departed from.


Argentinian indigenous

All american natives share the same roots and similar physical features: straigth and dark hair, sliding eyes , robust complexion, cheek bones prominent, and something very particular called the mongolian spot.

Mongolian Spot

Native American Indian

The mongolian spot is a blueish birth mark located normally by the coxis, down the spine, and happens to dessapear around 6 or 9 years old, is commoon among the people in Japan, Korea, China, the Polinessian Islands and in general thru all Assian looking tribes.


Amazonic kid

All the way from Tierra de Fuego in Argentina, passing through the Amazonics in Brasil, Incas in Peru, Mayas in Mexico and central America, Navajos, Cherokees, and practically all American and Canadian tribes, even those called Eskimos, in Alaska, have mongolian blue spot.

Recent discoveries support that 20,000 years ago there was a big block of ice from Wisconsin to Alaska, (the Wisconsin Glaciation), and from Alaska to Siberia, there was a bridge of ice conecting the continents thru a channel on the ocean called THE BERING STRAIT.


Alaska native Family

Evidence from a mummy found in Western Nevada in 1940 indicates that the body was 9,400 years old and when experts reconstructed the face from the skeleton, the features matched with a Northern Japanese group, and the clothing of the mummy matched with the textiles used still by that group. They could crossed by boat or even walked thru the 50 miles that separate Asia from North america.

If the first group of Pre-Mayas walked on a bridge of Ice till they eventually,  after an incredible nomadic adventure of 14,000 years, they finally arrived to Arizona, to the Anassasi Territory,( where some experts believe the previous groups that eventually would become the Mayas actually came from), it's fair to say that they left after all a FOOTPRINT OF WATER.


DAVID ECHEVERRIA

Tour Director
Mayan Encounter
daechegar@yahoo.es
www.mayanencounter.com

The Mayas for beginners chapter 2

The crater of chicxulub and the cenotes

It was 1978 when the Geofisicist Glen Penfield and Antonio Camargo where working for the mexican oil company PEMEX, when they found one of the most important discoveries of all times, a gigantic crater of 200 miles (300km) diameter in the gulf of Mexico, in front of the coast of a fishermen village named CHICXULUB (the Devil's flea in maya language) only about 4 miles east from the Port of Progreso, in the mexican state of Yucatan.

With the help of the canadian geologist Alan Hildebrand, Camargo and Penfield got samples of the border of the crater with high concentration of Iridium, a rare mineral in earth but really abundant in asteroids, wich confirmed the crater was caused by the impact of an asteroid no less than 6 miles (10km) diameter, 65 million years ago. 

It is confirmed today than the asteroid of Chicxulub killed most species of dinosaurs 65 millionn years ago, but is still a matter of debate if that was the only impact or there where others around the world. Is estimated than the impact in  Chicxulub was 2 million times  strongger than the most powerful bomb ever detonated by human beens (the Zar Bomb)

In 1996, a team of scientist from California, commanded by Adriana Ocampo, Kevin Pope and Charles Dullin, studied satelite pictures and discovered a ring of cenotes making the inland side of the crater.

See video about the Crater of Chicxulub

The Peninsula of Yucatan is a flat land with no rivers or lakes, the only kind of water runs under 90 feet of limestone in a very complex web of underground rivers. When the rain water filters through the ground, erotes the rock , and makes at the roof of the caves giant peaks of rock called estalactites, and at the bottom some others called estalacmites, thousands of years later, the roof gets fragil, hollow and breakable until one day it collapse, making a big hole at the roof or wich is the same, a hole in the ground level, the nearest well to the chicxulub impact is the one located at the mayan ruins of Dzibilchaltun.

The mayas found those natural wells and called them  CHE'EN and eventually DZONOT. At the year 455 ad a group of mayas found 14 of those natural wells in 25 square km. and decided to live near by , calling the place, The Mouth of the Well for the Magicians of the Water, CHI/ CHEN/ ITZ/ HA, in spanish, Chichen Itza. When the Spaniards arrived to the peninsula of Yucatan, in 1521 they  heard the mayas calling the wells DZONOT, but they couldn't pronounce it,  so they end up calling them CENOTES. Is easy to imagine then, that if one find a little mayan village in the middle of nowhere, there is water there. The cenotes where for the mayas, the access to the infraworld, a place to conect with their gods and ancestors and an endless source of clean and therefore, drinkable water.

David Alejandro Echeverria Garcia
daechegar@yahoo.es
david.echeverria@mayanencounter.com
www.mayanencounter.com

The Mayas for beginners

This is my first blog and  had the idea of sharing info about the mayas, but first of all I wanna share something about myself. I was born in Merida Yucatan, the southest part of Mexico, therefore my childhood was surrounded of Mayan culture and traditions, but as a young boy, history seem to be a boring subject to me, and the culture around me, old fashioned and full of superstitions, (most of young people I knew then, felt the same way) and the school trips to the mayan sites where more attractive by the simple fact of socializing on school time than the cultural background involved in them. I was 18 years old when I really discovered, during a trip to Tulum, how incredible culture the Mayas were and how people all around the world worship our culture and traditions while I was (again, like most kids my age) worshipping USA modern culture.
Today, at the age of 40 I feel encouraged of talking about everything I've learned about the Mayas trough all this years as a guide thru docens of mayan sites but mainly as a fanatic of culture and society.
Fom this moment on I will write an article about the mayas every other week.

 

 



David Alejandro Echeverria Garcia
daechegar@yahoo.es
david.echeverria@mayanencounter