So we all made it through Dec. 21 without the world ending.
But don’t dump out all that extra water and canned food yet. Seems that old Mayan calendar is tricky, and a German researchers says Christmas Eve might be the day to watch out for.
That’s right. Christmas Eve. You know, the night Santa’s flying, the night before we all wake up and open our presents. BOOM!
Nikolai Grube of the University of Bonn, a leading expert on Mayan and Mesoamerican advanced civilization, said 2012 is an interesting year for Mayan research, ABC News reports, but Dec. 21 might have been the wrong day to worry.
He said that researchers found the room of a scribe in Xultun in Guatemala, which was covered in numbers, images and calendar calculations that confirm the Mayans were also interested in astronomy, but much earlier than originally believed.
Dec. 21, 2012 was the end of the baktun, kind of like the end of the millenium the rest of the world celebrated on Dec. 31, 1999. There’s a big long, numerical explanation that probably nobody but scientists and Mayans really understands anyway, but the long and short of it is, you can’t match up our current calendar with the Mayans’ calendar without having it be off a few days, and Grube says the end of the Mayans’ 13th baktun might not have been on Friday, but instead will come Monday.
Christmas Eve.
But here’s the deal – even people of Mayan descent went about their own business Friday because they didn’t believe the world would end. In addition, about 80 percent of Mayan writings have been deciphered, and there are texts that predict dates far into the future past Dec. 21 or Dec. 24, 2012.
In other words, we should all be fine. We think.