Mayan Plumbing Found In Ancient City

DarkKnightRadick writes "An archaeologist and a hydrologist have published evidence that the ancient Mayans had pressurized plumbing as early as sometime between the year 100 (when the city of Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico, was first founded) and 800 (when it was abandoned). While the Egyptians had plumbing way earlier (around 2500 BC), this is the first instance of plumbing in the New World prior to European exploration and conquest."

Comments

Better than ours?

[SilverHatHacker]

Wonder if their shower temperatures went loopy when they flushed their toilets too?

Re:Better than ours?

[thoughtspace]

Wonder if their shower temperatures went loopy when they flushed their toilets too?

No , they sacrificed virgins to prevent that.

Re:Better than ours?

[Anonymous Coward]

All joking aside, Native Americans both in North and South America had rather terrible sanitation systems, even by the standards of their day. It was not unusual for them to defecate around the fire pits where they cooked and ate. At least the tendency in Europe, the Middle East and eastern Asia was to defecate away from living areas. However, even today we see some cultures who shit in the water that they drink. India is one such culture, and it's prevalent in Africa, too.

Re:Better than ours?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It turns out that that only happens when you aren't tossing enough severed heads down the steps of your blood-soaked skull-pyramids, and was thus an unheard of problem.

The "shoddy contractors" theory of water temperature problems is actually just a lie promulgated as part of the post-colonization suppression of native mythology.

Re:Better than ours?

[pipedwho]

However, even today we see some cultures who shit in the water that they drink. India is one such culture, and it's prevalent in Africa, too.

I thought it was people shitting in the water upstream from where 'somebody else' drinks.

Re:Better than ours?

[Inner_Child]

I thought we just called that "government".

Re:Better than ours?

[Cryacin]

Actually, until Typhoid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoid) struck in the late 19th century, even king's used to defecate in their bedrooms. The stench of feces used to be quite common amongst the civilised.

It usually takes a large amount of death/discomfort/destruction for things to change unfortunately. Especially with such a large public works project such as sanitation and clean water.

All though the Thames still stinks, I'm sure that it used to be much, much, much worse than even India at the time.

Re:Better than ours?

[amRadioHed]

Even more important to improving sanitation than death, discomfort, and destruction was the concept of germs which was only just gaining traction in the late 19th century.

Re:Better than ours?

[Anonymous Coward]

in the late 19th century, even king's used to defecate in their bedrooms.

The king owned a used, AND it defecated in his bedroom? Someone should tell the king to make sure his used is housebroken next time.

Re:Better than ours?

[jhoegl]

It usually takes a large amount of death/discomfort/destruction for things to change unfortunately. Especially with such a large public works project such as sanitation and clean water.

And thousands of years later.... same shit, different century.

Re:Better than ours?

[MichaelSmith]

Wonder if their shower temperatures went loopy when they flushed their toilets too?

No , they sacrificed virgins to prevent that.

What a waste.

(of virgins)

Re:Better than ours?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wonder if their shower temperatures went loopy when they flushed their toilets too?

Actually the pressure to the shower goes up when you flushed the toilets. We are talking Mexico here.

Re:Better than ours?

[rolfwind]

So any /.ers want to volunteer to jump into the volcano?

Re:Better than ours?

[rubycodez]

only the ugly ones

Re:Better than ours?

[Rude Turnip]

That's actually a sign of shoddy/lazy plumbing. If you have 3/4" pipe come into the bathroom, then split off to the toilet and shower using 1/2" pipe, you won't have that problem.

Re:Better than ours?

[Anonymous Coward]

All joking aside, Native Americans both in North and South America had rather terrible sanitation systems, even by the standards of their day. It was not unusual for them to defecate around the fire pits where they cooked and ate. At least the tendency in Europe, the Middle East and eastern Asia was to defecate away from living areas. However, even today we see some cultures who shit in the water that they drink. India is one such culture, and it's prevalent in Africa, too.

and in china where they will server it in restraunts

Re:Better than ours?

[rubycodez]

you mean it was re-gaining traction. Funny how it took western civilization over 1500 years to get back to where medicine was at the peak of the Roman Empire. Marcus Varro, 36 B.C. "and because there are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and there cause serious diseases". Other Roman doctors know to use antiseptics and antibiotics, and knew of germs/viruses by indirect means. Of course, 600 years before that, Indian civilization knew and wrote of living infectious agents they couldn't see , and had drugs and procedure to kill them and to inoculate.

But in the mid 19th century U.S. physicians were putting leaches on Abraham Lincoln, the primitive morons.

Re:Better than ours?

[ceoyoyo]

Whew. Good thing we're more civilized in North America.

http://en.epochtimes.com/news/6-12-5/48967.html

Re:Better than ours?

[corbettw]

Getting rid of ugly virgins? What kind of sacrifice is that?

Re:Better than ours?

[EdIII]

No , they sacrificed virgins to prevent that.

Don't say that on Slashdot!

Some people might get nervous around here....

Re:Better than ours?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

The question is, did those ancient Roman and Indian physicians actually know about germs, or were they just making a lucky guess? Without a microscope, the idea of "miasma" ("bad air") as an explanation for infectious disease, which was popular up through the 19th c., actually makes just about as much sense as germ theory. So I'd be interested to know the process by which the ancients arrived at their conclusion -- unless they devised some very clever experiments, they didn't really know what they were dealing with.

Re:Better than ours?

[Dr Herbert West]

If you're interested in the history of humankind's struggle to suss out the nature of disease, I strongly recommend a book called "The Ghost Map" by Steven Johnson. It details the cholera epidemics of London during the mid-1800s, and is particularly concerned with the (then heretical) idea that illnesses could be transmitted thru contaminated drinking water rather that as "maisma".

There's maps, evil bureaucrats, the struggle to figure out how disease patterns relate to the location of London's water pumps-- very much a detective story. It's one of those "historical-fact-with-fictional-details" type books-- similar to parts of Stevenson's Baroque cycle.

It's got some great details about the really gross and horrible effects of cholera as well.

Re:Better than ours?

[c6gunner]

Ah, yes: because pissing in the ocean is the same as shitting in your soup. You're a real intellectual giant, aren't you?

Re:Better than ours?

[sayfawa]

I agree with you that even kings used to defecate in their own bedrooms, but I'm inclined to see that as a relatively temporary period that was the result of advances in civil engineering outpacing advances in medicine. Kings, and other rich people, got used to the smells because they had to if they wanted to live in their stone castles and fortresses.

Ideally, we would have had plumbing as soon as we stopped being nomads. Unfortunately, we had to deal with centuries (millennia?) of filthy people who shat where they sat. Even the lowest mammals know not to do that (whoa, those rhymed). But if it's the choice between dealing with a stinky house and dying from exposure/bandits, what can you do?

But again, I agree with the idea. Those were some nasty guys. But I suspect they knew it was nasty.

Re:Better than ours?

[sayfawa]

I wouldn't say a lucky guess. You don't have to see something to infer it's existence. The spread of a disease, the way it's spread, and the ways to stop it from spreading could all have led them to the conclusion that the disease was caused by some air-bound, invisible (to them) agent. Those Romans and ancient Indians seemed like smart guys. Presumably, they could imagine that some things were too small to be seen. They did both come up with the idea of the atom, after all.

Re:Better than ours?

[flyingfsck]

The Romans and Greeks knew full well that dirty water spreads disease. That is why they went to such extraordinary lengths to gather water high in the mountains and pipe it through the cities. Their civil engineers did not need microscopes to figure that out.

Re:Better than ours?

[pclminion]

The question is, did those ancient Roman and Indian physicians actually know about germs, or were they just making a lucky guess?

But you can apply such an argument to anybody who doesn't have all the facts. Did Robert Boyle know, for certain, that gases were composed of minute particles, the kinetics of which could be used to derive his "Boyle's Law?" He did not. In the same sense as you are now implying, he made a "lucky guess." A guess which turned out to be correct, and his name has survived in history even though, in modern terms, he didn't know what the fuck he was talking about.

If somebody posits that minute organisms are the ultimate cause of disease, then I give that person props. I really don't give a shit that he cannot prove whether he's right. That fact is, he IS right. You attitude smacks of the bitterness of a person who has perpetually sought success but never achieved it. Whatever.

Re:Better than ours?

[Anonymous Coward]

" Funny how it took western civilization over 1500 years to get back to where medicine was at the peak of the Roman Empire. Marcus Varro, 36 B.C."

Blame Christianity.

Re:Better than ours?

[JWSmythe]

    Nah, they just pruned the ugly virgins. The hot ones became "special" priestesses. You know, the ones that served to the leaders "needs". There's a name for those now. What is that? Oh ya. Whores. :)

Re:Better than ours?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Ideally, we would have had plumbing as soon as we stopped being nomads." Yeah but we had the technology in Indus Valley civilization, and in Greece, and in Rome, and in Egypt, and in South America - but we forgot it.

Re:Better than ours?

[Hurricane78]

Well, the old Greeks already knew about atoms (that’s where the name comes from, after all), and also about steam engines.

But you can thank mostly the churches for going back to bullshit magic and being unable to write (except for the privileged) in what is called “the dark ages” for a reason...

Re:Better than ours?

[JWSmythe]

    With all the home repairs I've done over the last few years, "shoddy/lazy" work isn't the exception, it's the norm. I'd be delighted to find well thought out and designed work than the crap that they've been building for the last couple decades.

    3/4" pipe coming into the bathroom would be one of those examples. You *may* have 3/4" pipe coming in there, but you'll have 1/2" pipe coming in between the meter and the house. I've installed quite a few whole house water filtration systems (effective ones, not the crap that door to door guys try to sell), and found 1/2" pipe. WTF. Well, I'm not a plumber, so I'm not replumbing their whole house, but I have to convert the 1/2" to 1" for the filter and then back down to attach for the house. It doesn't hurt their pressure at all (like much would be worse at that point), but they tell me about existing problems where you can't do things like start the laundry *and* flush a toilet. And that's on city water, not on a well.

    I really believe building codes are a suggestion, and only used when a repair contractor wants to make more money. "Nope, we have to do it this way. I know it'll cost double, but it's code."

Re:Better than ours?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a real intellectual giant, aren't you?

And you're one to talk?

Re:Better than ours?

[Random Destruction]

or just turn tap on the the toilet down a bit. A little slower filling toilet isn't a big deal, and often eliminates the oh-my-god-im-showering-wtf problem.

Though of course proper plumbing is a much better solution.

Re:Better than ours?

[ozmanjusri]

If there was an ancient Mayan equivalant to Slashdot, they would have had a nearly inexhaustible supply.

Re:Better than ours?

[electrosoccertux]

No , they sacrificed virgins to prevent that.

Don't say that on Slashdot!

Some people might get nervous around here....

sacrificing a slashdot nerd would most certainly not be my first choice for appeasing the gods. Think of the stench wafting up from that pasty white unwashed skin and oily hair.

Re:Better than ours?

[Lorens]

All joking aside, Native Americans both in North and South America had rather terrible sanitation systems, even by the standards of their day. It was not unusual for them to defecate around the fire pits where they cooked and ate.

All my modding in this thread will be wasted now, but I don't have a mod named

[citation needed]

I've never heard Mayans called the "Native Americans" of South America.

Re:Better than ours?

[dargaud]

The Romans and Greeks knew full well that dirty water spreads disease. That is why they went to such extraordinary lengths to gather water high in the mountains and pipe it through the cities. Their civil engineers did not need microscopes to figure that out.

And right now there are still countries where people take water in the spring that comes to their house and clean their ass and throw their garbage in the the same spring, for the next house 20m below to enjoy. This kind of logic baffles the mind.

I often wonder where we would be if the greco-romans had the idea to use steam power... (Heron knew steam could be used on a small scale, but never thought 'bigger'). Their society was happy to rely on slaves I guess...

Re:Better than ours?

[Anonymous Coward]

to be fair he was shot, that was a pretty big piece of lead...

Re:Better than ours?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Boyle's laws can be confirmed by experiment without knowledge of the kinetics; he wasn't just guessing, he was formulating a model based on his observations. With regards to infectious disease, this is roughly equivalent to sanitary practices, which can be shown to work without an underlying knowledge of germ theory. But if you're going to propose a mechanism -- the behavior of gas molecules in the first case, that of infectious microorganisms in the second -- then unless you have some kind of evidence, then yes, it's a lucky guess. There is a reason why "model" and "theory" are two different words. Note that I'm not claiming models aren't useful; of course they are. But they do not lead to understanding of the underlying mechanisms in and of themselves.

Re:Better than ours?

[KiloByte]

They used male virgins, who are dime a dozen, both now and then.

Re:Better than ours?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Imagination isn't the same thing as inference. The fact that they could imagine germs, and for that matter atoms, doesn't mean that they actually knew such things existed in the same sense that we know today that they exist. Now, obviously, we can in fact infer the existence of things we can't see, and we have a well-established process for doing just that. I'm mainly curious as to how far back that process goes; the body of practices that we now call "the scientific method" is generally dated to the late Rennaissance, and I think it would be pretty cool if it turned out to be significantly older.

Re:Better than ours?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Knowing that dirty water spreads disease isn't the same thing as knowing why it spreads disease. Sanitation can be observed to be effective without any explanation of the underlying mechanism. My question is, did Varro and his Indian predecessors actually have evidence for their pathogen hypothesis, or did they simply pick the one of several possible explanations that happened to be right? If the former, I'd very interested to know what it was -- it's always fascinating when some bit of scientific knowledge turns out to be older than is generally believed.

Re:Better than ours?

[imakemusic]

I might be totally wrong here but didn't the harnessing of larger scale steam power rely on the invention of stronger metals and forging processes which were discovered after their time?

Still, it definitely would have made the world a different place.

Re:Better than ours?

[Serious Callers Only]

They did both come up with the idea of the atom [wikipedia.org], after all.

Atomism is a greek concept, not Roman, also, it was not a commonly accepted theory, far less so than say elements/humours.

You can easily over-interpret translations of older texts; that text by Varro could just as easily have been talking about dust mites rather than viruses/bacteria. I don't think it's fair to compare speculation in this case with the more thorough understanding we have of bacteria.
 

Re:Better than ours?

[Anonymous Coward]

Were those Leaches direct ancestors of Cary Grant? Or did you mean leeches?

Re:Better than ours?

[Anonymous Coward]

If somebody posits that minute organisms are the ultimate cause of disease, then I give that person props. I really don't give a shit that he cannot prove whether he's right. That fact is, he IS right. You attitude smacks of the bitterness of a person who has perpetually sought success but never achieved it. Whatever.

There is a huge difference between "lucky guess" and "can't prove he's right".

For example, ask any random person on the street whether P != NP. Now, maybe in a hundred years, it'll turn out they were right. Are you gonna give them props? I'd hope not.

What you don't seem to be getting is that it could well be that the Romans were just talking out of their asses, too, coming up with all sorts of loopy theories about where diseases are from, and one of them just happened to be right, purely by chance.

I don't know whether that's the case or whether the Romans *really* had a good reason to suspect there really was such a thing as germs. But I realize it's not the same thing, at least.

Re:Better than ours?

[Kashgarinn]

It's the old adage that you have to teach every new generation what the old one already knows.. if you don't, you get bouts of dark ages.

There's no guarantee that what one person researches and discovers gets shared with all the people who need to know so they don't make mistakes in what they do, the biggest example is of course medicine and doctors, no one wants mis-diagnosis, but it happens, and the problem is that there isn't a educational system which makes sure that people who need to know, know.. you know?

There's a pretty great ted talk here: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_pink_on_motivation.html - why isit relevant? because if you want to generate the most competent next generation, you have to motivate them, and to motivate someone, you should know how to motivate people.

We need to motivate people to do the right thing, and to know how to do that, we ourselves need to know how to be properly motivated to see how to do it right.

I also like this ted-talk because it's right, but goes against normality in how we think about motivation. And guess what, if people don't learn this, we'll time and time again get sucked back into the ignorant way of doing things.

There are plenty of professions where there is a real dark-age in how some people know how to do things better, but the profession doesn't change for one reason or another. Probably yours, dear reader, is a part of it and you yourself.

Re:Better than ours?

[sourcerror]

Last time I checked the Bible, the old testament has passages about to bury your feces, not to make love with a menstruating woman, and some other common sense stuff. Heck, do you have any idea why Jews and Muslims don't eat pork?

Re:Better than ours?

[JasterBobaMereel]

Reading the actual document he was warning about tiny airborne animals and recommended avoiding living near, or building on high ground (in good air), or so that the prevailing winds did not blow from the swamp ...

Sounds like the miasma theory by another name .... which works because generally Bad air does mean disease

The London Sewers were built because of the miasma theory, not germ theory (which came later).... and worked ....

Just because a theory is wrong does not mean it doesn't work, and if it works it will be re-invented over and over ...

Re:Better than ours?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you are an engineer and get the things done. He is a mathematician and wants a proof that it works.

Re:Better than ours?

[vegiVamp]

Well, the gods are the ones going on about how it's the inside of a person that matters most. Plenty of insides in a fat virgin.

Re:Better than ours?

[jambox]

Just speculating but I'd reckon that once someone conceived of the idea of tiny little creatures, you'd then start to think of ways to get rid of them. Washing off, drying out, perhaps treating with salt and so on all spring to mind immediately but wouldn't if you were intellectually stuck on miasmas. With a bad smell you're more or less holding your hands up and saying "well, you're screwed, there's nothing we can do about it".

Re:Better than ours?

[vegiVamp]

They're still at it, aren't they ? Condoms don't work against HIV, prayer does.

Re:Better than ours?

[Anonymous Coward]

And there goes the patent system, again. I was so close filing a patent for that one, with the virgin to be sacrificed being me.
Everything that has happened, will happen again and again and again and again and again...

Re:Better than ours?

[ceoyoyo]

Ever smelled certain of the Great Lakes? They're not exactly an ocean.

But then I guess you'd know all about it, since someone obviously pissed in your cornflakes this morning.

Re:Better than ours?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a leech farmer, you insensitive clod!

Re:Better than ours?

[Anonymous Coward]

But they were mass-slaughtering Indians using variola-infected blankets, clothes, and stuff - since the 17somethings.

Western tradition, I suppose. "ARMIS BELLA NON VENENIS GERI"

Of course, the US health system has always been a bit laggard and eugenic. And (medicinal-grade) leeches help circulation, ease local swelling, and ease blood pressure a bit.

When rising resistance soon makes all antibiotics useless again, everyone will have to go back to them - and fly-larvae, frogskin juices, snail-mucus, propolis... If any survive the climate disaster.

Should relieve financial pressure on the welfare and health systems.

But, I've heard there's some interesting research going on regarding Komodo Dragon's immune system genes.

Re:Better than ours?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you can construct a germ theory without seeing the buggers. First, you observe how parasites spread between persons. Then you observe a decease spreading with a similar pattern. Then you observe how some deceases are spread more easily to individuals who expose their nose and mouth to a decease in various forms. The observation of decease spreading without direct physical contact is also made.
  You already consider decease as something internal to a body and not an evil spirit (the witchcraft doesn't work) or an outside agent, so you conclude the decease has entered the body from the outside through a body opening in a form similar to a parasite. This hypothesis is strengthened by observing visible parasites infesting a body through the nose and mouth.
  One can see that in nature, there are so small creatures as being difficult to be seen with the eye. By liberally applying the Democritus' atom hypothesis one concludes that there must be even smaller creatures living in the nature, so small that one can't see them with eyes at all.
  By observing nature, one can additionally see small creatures being lighter in weight than large creatures. One can see really small creatures and seeds as capable of floating in the air via various means of floatation and flight. Therefore the parasites which are so small as to be invisible to the eye are sufficiently light to be able to float in the air.

Re:Better than ours?

[Anonymous Coward]

You really should blame the Romans for the fall of the Roman Empire. They were in charge.

Truth is that every major civilization that has collapsed did so because it rotted from within.

Re:Better than ours?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, this is more a case of looking back at dozens of theories of disease, and cherry picking the one that was right in 20/20 hindsight. (And then complaining about how stupid people were back then.)

"They", as a civilization, didn't _know_ that disease could be caused by germs. A few people happened to get it right, but nobody back then had the scientific means to perform clinical trials and discriminate between true and false hypotheses.

Where luck came into play was that a hypothesis that turned out to be correct was actually written down and preserved until today so we could bellyache over it.

Re:Better than ours?

[rubycodez]

with a very weak black powder charge behind it and 2-1/2" barrel, the 44 cal Philadelphia Deringer's wounds should have been highly survivable. Lincoln lived for 9 hours, maybe the doctors killed him with their bloodletting.

Re:Better than ours?

[Attila Dimedici]

Actually, you can thank Alexander the Great for the loss of the theory of atomism. Aristotle had a competing theory and he was Alexander the Great's tutor. As a result of his political connections, Aristotle's theory won the day.

Re:Better than ours?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the old Greeks already knew about atoms (that’s where the name comes from, after all)

Right. And they invented lambda expressions on their ancient PDP-0s.

Re:Better than ours?

[GooberToo]

But in the mid 19th century U.S. physicians were putting leaches on Abraham Lincoln, the primitive morons.

Don't forget that its widely believe Lincoln would have recovered to some degree, albeit with a bullet in his head, had it not been for his doctors constantly running metal probes and even their fingers into his brain while he was incapacitated.

It was actually Lincoln's doctors, literally, who were the instrument of death.

Re:Better than ours?

[Gilmoure]

But if you had pasty white hair and oily skin...

Re:Better than ours?

[MediaCastleX]

All this is really making my nose itch. Can you guys even *read* this stuff anymore?! It's getting kind of cramped in this space...

Re:Better than ours?

[Himring]

But more women are religious than men. Any guy who gets some knows faking faith gets you laid. Atheists ARE virgins, thus, fewer of you. My god, this is all making sense now....

Re:Better than ours?

[gstoddart]

Plenty of insides in a fat virgin.

Plenty of outside as well. :-P

Re:Better than ours?

[Anonymous Coward]

But if you're going to propose a mechanism -- the behavior of gas molecules in the first case, that of infectious microorganisms in the second -- then unless you have some kind of evidence, then yes, it's a lucky guess.

Actually, the minute creatures make more sense if you look at the spreading of infections, and not just how infections are passed from one host to another. "Bad gas" doesn't multiply, creatures do.

Re:Better than ours?

[Archangel Michael]

Actually, I don't blame the "church" per se, I blame the idea of Elitism. That only Specialists are allowed to direct the masses, who are nothing more than ignorant peasants.

We have the very same thing going on now, but it isn't "religion" or even "Christianity" doing it, it is the elite liberal establishment, who ignore the obvious when it doesn't suit their agenda.

I'm not saying the church was not to blame here, because it obviously was. However the problem wasn't part of "Christianity" but rather was Elitism.

If you read the Bible, even the New Testament, you'd realize that even Jesus took exception from the Elitism of his day, and chose smelly fishermen, and tax collectors to be his Apostles, rather than the Elite Pharisee's and Scribes.

Even in the Old Testament has examples after examples of "common" people (shepherds, slaves) becoming great leaders, often in the face of the elite establishment.

But then again, that probably doesn't fit with your narrative about those of us living in "fly over country", you know, we stupid simpltons who aren't as finely nuanced as your favorite Elites living in Ivory Towers and running the Governement. Which is why so many of them despise the Tea Party movement as being a bunch of stupid commoners.

Re:Better than ours?

[c6gunner]

Ever smelled certain of the Great Lakes?

Is that even English?

They're not exactly an ocean.

It's called an "analogy", numbnuts.

Re:Better than ours?

[eleuthero]

And of course, we also have Galen, hero of anatomy, founding the practice of blood-letting while also inventing cataract surgery... I guess genius and idiocy walk together sometimes.

Re:Better than ours?

[ceoyoyo]

"Is that even English?"

Yes, it is. Somewhat informal English, yes. To be completely correct I should have prepended "Have you" to the sentence, but it is common in informal English communication to omit such parts of speech when they are clearly implied.

Maybe you should avoid sarcastically calling other people "real intellectual giant[s]."

You made a sarcastic "analogy." I spit it back at you. Were you expecting a non-sarcastic response to your idiotic post?

Re:Better than ours?

[jd]

So you're saying they understood the law of conservation of energy? (Blood is warm, so if you put enough blood on the pyramid and ground and allow the blood to cool, the water must warm up.)

Re:Better than ours?

[c6gunner]

Yes, it is. Somewhat informal English, yes. To be completely correct I should have prepended "Have you" to the sentence

No, that doesn't even come close to describing what's wrong with your question. I would have made allowances for such a minor error.

Maybe you should avoid sarcastically calling other people "real intellectual giant[s]."

Why?

You made a sarcastic "analogy." I spit it back at you. Were you expecting a non-sarcastic response to your idiotic post?

Since I made a valid refutation to your .... "point" ... yes, I certainly was expecting a serious response. You could have phrased it in a sarcastic way, if you so chose, as long as you made a valid argument.

You chose to do neither - your response to me wasn't "sarcastic" by any stretch of the imagination, nor did it add anything to the discussion. It consisted of three sentences; the first, a nonsensical question, the second, an irrelevant truism, and the third, a strange attempt at an insult. Which one of those was sarcastic? The question?

Re:Better than ours?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because parasites suck :P

Re:Better than ours?

[SleazyRidr]

I remember hearing about some of the first indoor plumbing in England; Queen Victoria would travel around various nobles' houses, and stay in each one until it started to stink (she had a big entourage.) Some bloke (whose name I forget) came up with the idea so that he could get the Queen to stay longer and gain more influence with her...

Re:Better than ours?

[modecx]

In my neighborhood, you're extremely lucky if you've got a 3/8" tap coming off the main--you know after the pipe has filled up with corroded crap over the decades. My house had maybe a 1/16" hole, out of what was at one point a 3/4" tap.

You could have 3" piping to the bathroom and it's not going to help in that situation :)

Re:Better than ours?

[et764]

I and most Christians I know do not have a problem with condoms, and we probably wouldn't even recommend prayer as the most effective way to prevent HIV. What we'd probably recommend instead is to only have sex with the person you're married to. Sure, this doesn't work too well against rape and blood transfusions, but then again, condoms don't really work there either.

Re:Better than ours?

[drsquare]

Yes, the 'liberal elite' (can't believe people actually use that term unironically) caused the Dark Ages...

You'll find that the modern equivalent of the Christian establishment are presidents with voices in their head 'from God'.

Re:Better than ours?

[JWSmythe]

    Well, you should have a 3" pipe in the bathroom too, but that's not for drinking from. :)

Re:Better than ours?

[modecx]

Dangit, so that's my problem!

Re:Better than ours?

[rubycodez]

I'm flipping you the læcfinger

Re:Better than ours?

[rubycodez]

having sex with a menstruating woman is utterly harmless, though perhaps messy. A list of diseases beef cattle can transmit is no shorter than a hog's list. And I'll take swine flu over mad cow disease any day of the week.

The answer to your question is that Jews and Muslims both follow a false religion worshiping an imaginary god who doesn't exist, with a whole list of random rules thought up by the most worthless and power-grubbing sector of their society

Re:Better than ours?

[losfromla]

Imagination isn't the same thing as inference. The fact that they could imagine germs, and for that matter atoms, doesn't mean that they actually knew such things existed in the same sense that we know today that they exist.

Try telling that to the string theoristians.

Re:Better than ours?

[losfromla]

And right now there are still countries where people take water in the spring that comes to their house and clean their ass and throw their garbage in the the same spring, for the next house 20m below to enjoy. This kind of logic baffles the mind.

And right now, virtually every city in the US is marginally filtering and massively loading with chlorine, effluent water from upstream cities and factories and selling it as potable. Chew on that since you seem to thing we've come such a long way from these uncivilized countries.

Re:Better than ours?

[losfromla]

with a whole list of random rules thought up by the most worthless and power-grubbing sector of their society

I like the idea... maybe if we were able to chase it far back enough, the priest(?) who came up with the don't-eat-pork rule was a cattle rancher that wanted to bankrupt the pig farmer who had taken the girl he loved because she preferred pork to beef... Is there any way to check if this notion holds water?

Re:Better than ours?

[rubycodez]

lack of muscle tone that most fat girls have means a loose vagina too. bad on the inside!

Re:Better than ours?

[vegiVamp]

True, and I apologise for not specifying that I was aiming at the loonies in the vatican and their emissaries.

Re:Better than ours?

[sourcerror]

Cattle flesh can't be infected by flies. I creates a special layers preventing it.
Of course there are a lot of random rules mixed up with useful ones.

Re:Better than ours?

[Ol Olsoc]

Good thing we don't do that anymore - Bye Bye Slashdot!

Re:Better than ours?

[drkim]

Correct...sort of how Mendel was able to calculate heredity, without knowing anything about DNA.

Re:Better than ours?

[Archangel Michael]

I didn't say "Liberal Elite" caused the dark ages. I said Elitism did.

ANY time someone claims to know what is best for OTHER people, they are ELITES, and they can be of ANY political or religious background.

You don't know what is best for me any more than I know what is best for you. However I do realize that there are a large number of people who love telling me what I should or should not be doing, most of which is none of their business whatsoever.

Latest case of this is telling me, I have to buy Medical Insurance because ... well ... quite frankly ... I'm too stupid to figure out what is best for me (and all the other stupid people without insurance).

Tell me, who are they to tell me what is best for me? One size fits all is a lie, and I don't have an option to escape the utopian rose tinted glasses of stupid "Progressives" who love to tell everyone what they should be doing.

But then again, I'm just a stupid illiterate mouth breather from flyover country, so what do I know?

Re:Better than ours?

[GameboyRMH]

According to your definition, anyone who exerts any kind of authority on other people is an ELITE. I'd point out things conservatives are often ELITE about (drugs/manlove/privacy) but you've admitted they can be of any political or religious background.

So is there any middle ground between "elitism" and anarchism to you? I could only imagine a pure democracy where leaders are neutral arbitrators who enforce the will of the majority - this way you'd only have to deal with "elitist" voters - but I don't think this is what you're suggesting.

No big surprise,,,

[Overzeetop]

If the aliens gave pluming to the Egyptians, why not the Mayans?

Re:No big surprise,,,

[Anonymous Coward]

Plumage featured in the head dress of the native Americans, not so much the Egyptians.

Re:No big surprise,,,

[biryokumaru]

No, not plumbing:

from the series-of-tubes dept.

Clearly, the aliens gave them both the internet! If only Senator Stevens had been an Egyptologist, we would have known sooner...

Re:No big surprise,,,

[JustOK]

exclusive marketing

Re:No big surprise,,,

[shutdown -p now]

Because travellers from the future got to the Mayans before the aliens. So aliens had to settle on Egyptians.

Re:No big surprise,,,

[noidentity]

If the aliens gave pluming to the Egyptians, why not the Mayans?

What kind of feathers?

Re:No big surprise,,,

[Ajaxamander]

Blue Man Group starts a segment of their show with a hilarious video on the topic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hTosCUTmck

Re:No big surprise,,,

[Overzeetop]

That would be plumage.

The pluming I refer to was the act of making or preparing plums for food. The consumption of which would lead - obviously - to the need for plumbing (at least when the fruit is ingested in it's dried state). ;-)

pattern?

[ascari]

There was Harappa and Mohenjo Daro in the Indus valley, then the Egyptians, then the Mayans. Is it just coincidence that advanced cultures tend to go under within a couple of centuries after they invent plumbing? If so, are we doomed?

Re:pattern?

[libwolf]

Sure, but it's not cause of the plumbing.

Re:pattern?

[M. Baranczak]

Is it just coincidence that advanced cultures tend to go under within a couple of centuries after they invent plumbing?

Cultures go under all the time, with or without plumbing.

are we doomed?

Most certainly.

Re:pattern?

[OnePumpChump]

If you don't have to go outside to shit, you grow complacent and weak.

Re:pattern?

[Cryacin]

More like you let someone else deal with your shit. That permeates to all aspects and corners of life. Another example that springs to mind is outsourcing.

Re:pattern?

[OnePumpChump]

Somalia is under-polluted.

Re:pattern?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I doubt that it's the plumbing per se; but a rise in interlocking technical and social complexity really helps if you want to "go under" in a way dramatic enough for history to notice.

Barring fairly rare events(like the sudden appearance of really nasty plagues, or an advanced culture showing up and gunning you down, or both), low-complexity cultures don't really "collapse" in any useful sense. They wax and wane a bit, some years good some years bad, and they may undergo various sorts of linguistic and genetic shifts due to warfare and migration; but they aren't specialized enough for things to really go to hell.

If you have interlocking specialization, though, you have entire institutions, and populations, that are basically dependent on large numbers of other structures and people for their continued existence. This makes it fairly easy for the right push to, instead of "reducing the hunter-gatherer population by ~10%" do something more along the lines of "catastrophic mass starvation, entire cities abandoned to the flames, the capital investments of 200 years annihilated within months".

Re:pattern?

[hhedeshian]

What'll be different, I think, is that a lot less information will be lost in the demise of a "modern" culture simply due to the global (that's the key word here) communications network and data archival abilities we now possess. If the US went into oblivion, the world wouldn't have to re-invent the Ford Model-T or "Freedom Fries"; That data will be quite difficult to get rid of due to geographic redundancy.

Also, spoken langauges don't die off in short periods of time. Given the available compute power and potential advances in translation software, it should be relively easy to bring texts up to the new language. You won't need a giant rock and guys like Daniel Jackson spouting some Goa'uld nonsense.

Re:pattern?

[c0y]

Some people believe that toilets don't allow for complete elimination and are the source of a lot of colon cancer.

For my part, I've realized that after a lot of years camping and having to squat over a hole I dig, that at some point my knees simply won't let me do that any more. I've come to believe that maybe people die younger in parts of the world that lack sit down toilets and remember this quote by Charles Bukowski:

Sex is interesting, but it's not totally important. I mean it's not even as important (physically) as excretion. A man can go seventy years without a piece of ass, but he can die in a week without a bowel movement.
- Charles Bukowski

Re:pattern?

[corbettw]

"catastrophic mass starvation, entire cities abandoned to the flames, the capital investments of 200 years annihilated within months".

Oh please, 2009 wasn't that bad.

Re:pattern?

[PopeRatzo]

Cultures go under all the time, with or without plumbing.

When I was in grad school at Columbia, I lived in a Harlem sub-let that had plumbing from about about 100 C.E.

I seem to recall some Mayan hieroglyphs around the front door, too. They translated as "Manny is a fuggin' puto"

I don't know about the culture of New York, but those few years almost put me under. You could buy seven dollar bags of brown heroin in my building day or night. That, and the cockroaches the size of nutria did not make for an atmosphere conducive to my studies, to say the least.

But there were some incredible radio stations on the dial. And I learned to salsa AND break dance. Not really well, but good enough to impress my friends back home in Chicago. Ah, memories...

Now what were we talking about? Oh yeah, plumbing. It's a good thing. You don't realize how good until it doesn't work. And everybody knows that the Shining Ones brought plumbing to the Ananazi at Ba'albek, along with edible wheat.

Re:pattern?

[flyingfsck]

No co-incidence. It is called 'earth quakes' and we all live on the same planet. So no co-incidence here.

Re:pattern?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Insensitive clod. I'm reduced to posting messages to slashdot written in my own blood, by the light of a burning hobo, over a half-duplex rfc1149 link.

Re:pattern?

[lawpoop]

Some people believe that toilets don't allow for complete elimination and are the source of a lot of colon cancer.

This is true, but plumbing ans sewer systems != sit-down toilets.

IIRC, modern sit-down toilets were invented by John C. Crapper sometime in the 1700s. I could look this up and link this to wikipedia, but my karma is good enough.

So all these ancient civilizations we're hearing about that had plumbing systems -- Egypt, the Indus valley, the Mayans, Rome -- they were all still squatting to take a shit.

In fact I understand that squat toilets are still common in China, India, and the Middle East to this day.

Re:pattern?

[M. Baranczak]

Oh, for those innocent years when we thought we could solve the world's problems by breakdancing.

Re:pattern?

[Hurricane78]

Is it just coincidence that advanced cultures tend to go under within a couple of centuries after they invent plumbing?

I’ll make it short:

Yes.

Re:pattern?

[JWSmythe]

... And most of the population don't know how to work an e-tool. Dig a latrine pit for fucks sake, I don't want to smell your shit rotting next door.

Re:pattern?

[Anonymous Coward]

There was no stargate in ancient Central America.

Re:pattern?

[gyrogeerloose]

I seem to recall some Mayan hieroglyphs around the front door, too. They translated as "Manny is a fuggin' puto"

That must have been that bastard Ah Kin Xoc. He's been calling "Manny" (Mulac) a puto for years now, ever since he caught him banging Hun-Hunapu in the men's room at the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

Re:pattern?

[electrosoccertux]

What'll be different, I think, is that a lot less information will be lost in the demise of a "modern" culture simply due to the global (that's the key word here) communications network and data archival abilities we now possess. If the US went into oblivion, the world wouldn't have to re-invent the Ford Model-T or "Freedom Fries"; That data will be quite difficult to get rid of due to geographic redundancy.

  Also, spoken langauges don't die off in short periods of time. Given the available compute power and potential advances in translation software, it should be relively easy to bring texts up to the new language. You won't need a giant rock and guys like Daniel Jackson spouting some Goa'uld nonsense.

If you can't read Shakespeare in English, what's the point? Dante's Inferno becomes a work of intellect and story and loses all poetic meaning.

Re:pattern?

[Lorens]

half-duplex rfc1149 link.

You mean you only have ONE pigeon? I thought you needed two for bidirection communication. Are Mayan pigeons more advanced than ours?

Re:pattern?

[Richard_at_work]

You should visit a French motorway facility then - squat toilets can be seen in a modern western civilisation there.

Re:pattern?

[dargaud]

There's a quote that says that no civilization / society is more than 3 meals away from revolution / anarchy...

Re:pattern?

[AmonTheMetalhead]

Your socalled "Freedom Fries" are a European invention, it's one of those rare things invented in Belgium worth a damn, and one of the few things Belgians are proud of (together with our beers & chocolates)

Re:pattern?

[T.E.D.]

They Egyptian culture never "went under". They just got conqured a lot. Sort of like China, but on a smaller scale.

Re:pattern?

[Anonymous Coward]

Certainly, technical knowledge tends to be preserved. Nobody knows who invented the wheel, or where it was invented.
  And when a catastrophe comes, there will always be an irish monk to re-illiterate europe.

Re:pattern?

[Attila Dimedici]

If the U.S. went into oblivion suddenly, the entire world's technological infrastructure would fail. Not just because of the loss of the U.S., but because of the turmoil and disorder that would result (or have been the cause). 50 years ago, the collapse would have been much less, 50 years from now such a collapse would be much worse (assuming the U.S. maintains its current position of dominance for the next 50 years).
If the U.S. does not maintain its current position of dominance for at least the next 20 years, we will all get to see what a collapse of civilization looks like.

Re:pattern?

[Anonymous Coward]

I knew that buying 4 kg protein concentrate will pay back one day.

Re:pattern?

[Urkki]

If the U.S. went into oblivion suddenly, the entire world's technological infrastructure would fail. Not just because of the loss of the U.S., but because of the turmoil and disorder that would result (or have been the cause). 50 years ago, the collapse would have been much less, 50 years from now such a collapse would be much worse (assuming the U.S. maintains its current position of dominance for the next 50 years).

If the U.S. does not maintain its current position of dominance for at least the next 20 years, we will all get to see what a collapse of civilization looks like.

Nah. Just think of WW2. None of the civilisations involved got annihilated, not even those that lost completely. US suddenly getting annihilated would be even less severe than WW2 was. Or think of something like the Black Death in middle ages. Something like third of Europeans killed in a short time-frame. Yet Europe did not collapse.

We may hit shitty times, as bad as WW2 or the Black Death, and that may happen within our lifetime, but I don't think that'll cause any modern civilisation to collapse. There might be starvation, rioting, revolutions, wars, inquisition, you name it, but historically that's perfectly normal. Most of us have just lived so shielded lives that it sounds like collapse of civilisation. But really, it's just "interesting times".

Re:pattern?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I implemented a nonstandard extension to the protocol by stamping "RETURN TO SENDER" on the pigeon's head. So far, so good.

Re:pattern?

[tehcyder]

If you don't have to go outside to shit, you grow complacent and weak.

You must be fun at parties.

Unfortunately

[Anonymous Coward]

researchers found the Mayan plumbing to be full of shit.

Re:Unfortunately

[biryokumaru]

No (-) Troll, (+) Funny!

Re:SOLUTION? DEPORT ALL MUSLIMIICS

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're referring to the recent attempt, he was actually a naturalized US citizen. And as far as I can tell from the death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan, the "towelheads" are pretty damned good at making bombs.

Mystery solved! Doomsday cancelled!

[adosch]

Guess we all know where all Mayans sacrificial human remains got flushed into now. I'm sure it'll be no time before some archaeological hippy is down there collecting petrified poo and proving the Mayan doomsday 2012 calendar wrong.

Cappadocians

[Anonymous Coward]

Bob: Cecil, no civilization in history has ever considered chief hydrological engineer a calling.
[Cecil clears his throat meaningfully]
Yes, yes, the Cappadocians, fine.

and Mayans?

Six easy steps to avert collapse of civilization

[jamshid]

Okay, not really related to ancient Mayan plumbing, but that article did make me think about this great talk by neuroscientist and writer David Eagleman:
http://www.longnow.org/seminars/02010/apr/01/six-easy-steps-avert-collapse-civilization/

Plumbing allows people to bathe regularly.

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone please alert Stallman to this basic fact.

Re:SOLUTION? DEPORT ALL MUSLIMIICS

[Anonymous Coward]

Get them out before we have to endure more imcompetence. Is it any wonder the middle east is 3rd world? Those towelheads are to stipud to make a bumb even!

Wow. Racist shitheads get smarter and smarter every day.

Just waiting for...

[Anonymous Coward]

the giant flush of 2012

It was the beans

[Anonymous Coward]

...evidence that the ancient Mayans had pressurized plumbing...

Re:Mystery solved! Doomsday cancelled!

[ijakings]

All they will find is goldfish and sweetcorn

Just to hear Steve

[delta98]

tHE PLUMBERS tHE PLUMBERS tHE PLUMBERS!!!!

Pretty Neat

[Tremegorn]

The guy who has the photo credit in the article (Kirk French) was my Archaeology TA during my freshman year. (I'm currently attending PSU for an EE degree). He's a really cool guy, glad to see he's doing well.

That aside, this is actually a pretty big discovery; very few ancient civilizations actually managed complex engineering achievements like running water. If anything this just adds to the mystery, if they had engineering knowledge of similar level to the Romans, why did their civilization suddenly die out?

Re:Pretty Neat

[sznupi]

Still not similar, it seems. And don't we have a sensibly clear image of what happened with their civilisation? (certain stagnation to some degree, also perhaps due to wasting of human resources; and locked into delicate, almost ceremonial balance with other local powers...a state which was rapidly destabilised by arrival of Europeans?)

Re:Pretty Neat

[delta98]

Stick around long enough and you'll find out.

Re:Pretty Neat

[delta98]

not trying to be funny but you are a walking fossil. In years to come someone will dig up our current civilization,scratch their head and ask the same questions.

Re:Pretty Neat

[eln]

There are plenty of theories regarding the Maya collapse, but European invasion isn't one of them. The collapse happened well before the Europeans showed up.

Re:Pretty Neat

[GiMP]

The theory that was told to me by Mayans, and confirmed by several online sources, is that of severe drought, exacerbated by deforestation. It seems that most large tribes split, smaller ones formed, and perhaps some small villages existed in a relative state of anarchy. By the time the Europeans arrived, there were still (or again) some larger tribes. Of course, the Mayans still live today, both ethnically and -- to a degree -- culturally.

Re:Pretty Neat

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I've heard the theory suggested that engineering knowledge(and accompanying social and technical organization) is exactly what allows a civilization to suddenly die out.

Technology(speaking in the broad sense, including things like complex social structures, bureaucracies, and so forth) is extremely powerful; but also makes it fairly easy to get locked-in to brittle trajectories where(even if alternatives are theoretically possible), your only real approach to any problem becomes "do whatever it is we already do; but more, and harder". This often goes poorly. Worse, you have usually managed to build a population that depends on your complex social structures, which makes for a fun die-off if they should come loose.

When the Roman legions stopped being a net gain, through plunder and Romanization, and started to become a liability(since they couldn't expand the borders any further, and spent most of their time fighting civil wars to install one emperor after another), Roman civilization as a whole never really came up with an alternative. They pretty much just raised more, tried harder, passed a few more laws to try to preserve the status quo. Long-view, they were following a doomed path, proximately, though, they didn't really have a whole lot of options. Any emperor who adopted a "fewer legions" policy would find himself replaced with extreme prejudice by somebody willing to do the opposite.

I don't know how the Mayans went down; but complexity quite possibly helped them along.

Re:Pretty Neat

[gstoddart]

That aside, this is actually a pretty big discovery; very few ancient civilizations actually managed complex engineering achievements like running water.

Actually, the more I hear about ancient civilizations, the more I believe that in at least some regards, they had knowledge that was lost to the West until sometime after the Renaissance. They didn't know everything, but they sure as shit knew a lot. Certainly a lot more than has been attributed to them during most of my lifetime.

If anything this just adds to the mystery, if they had engineering knowledge of similar level to the Romans, why did their civilization suddenly die out?

One could ask the same question of Western Society -- a tremendous amount of stuff which was apparently fairly well-known in antiquity didn't get found out again until the last several hundred years.

How is is that "our" civilizations suddenly died out? There's probably a good 1000 years in which we managed to root around in the muck whereas before we had better ways of doing it. WTF happened there?

Re:Pretty Neat

[lawpoop]

Any emperor who adopted a "fewer legions" policy would find himself replaced with extreme prejudice by somebody willing to do the opposite.

For some reason, I'm having mental images of Roman legions marching through Iraq and Afghanistan, with predator drones buzzing overhead.

Re:Pretty Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

What else do you do with a bunch of people that are basically killing machines?

Oh, right, send them to kill random people.

Re:Pretty Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy who has the photo credit in the article (Kirk French) was my Archaeology TA during my freshman year. (I'm currently attending PSU for an EE degree). He's a really cool guy, glad to see he's doing well.

Name Dropper.

Re:Pretty Neat

[oldhack]

When the Roman legions stopped being a net gain, through plunder and Romanization, and started to become a liability(since they couldn't expand the borders any further, and spent most of their time fighting civil wars to install one emperor after another), Roman civilization as a whole never really came up with an alternative...

And the history repeats, but with small alteration. That sounds exactly like how they describe Ottoman janissaries.

Re:Pretty Neat

[Hurricane78]

why did their civilization suddenly die out?

Are you actually serious with that question???

First of all: There are still 6.1 million Mayans around. Mostly in Yucatán, Guatemala (40% of the population!), Belize (10%), and Honduras.

Second: Hmm... there was this pretty big thing around 1492, wasn’t there? I think they “discovered” something. What was it again? India? Antarctica? I know it started with A... And then someone wanted lots of gold or something, and paid with, I guess mostly with diseases... Hmm... somehow I can’t remember it... <:-[[ Do you?

Re:Pretty Neat

[Cylix]

The History channel's Modern Marvels nearly always provides a reference to the ancient rome.

So much so that a running joke amongst my friends is that when Modern Marvel's eventually covers the "data center" they will likely mention it was first invented by the Romans.

Re:Pretty Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you ought to ask a Mayan about it? While their civilization may have died out, the people still survive into the present, though for how long isn't very certain. Granted, much of the information may be locked up in handed down oral histories, but then, so was the Bible until it occurred to someone to bother to write it down. Perhaps not the most accurate historical record (depending on whom you ask, of course), but still, not without historical value at some level. But seriously, ask a Mayan about it, no reason to think that "modern" largely Anglo-centric civillizations have a monopoly on intelligent conversation.

Re:Pretty Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

The History channel's Modern Marvels nearly always provides a reference to the ancient rome.

Because, according to white folx, all of this stuff started with the Romans. Nobody did it before.

Re:Pretty Neat

[TubeSteak]

First of all: There are still 6.1 million Mayans around. Mostly in Yucatán, Guatemala (40% of the population!), Belize (10%), and Honduras.

I've seen numbers from 10~13 million bandied about as the peak population of the Mayan civilization before their crash.

Considering that 90~95% of them died during the population crash...
It took 1,000 years for between 500K to 1.3 million Mayans to grow to the 6.1 million you claim are around today.

Re:Pretty Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

One wonders how something that happened in 1492 could cause the Classic Maya collapse, which happened around 800. Did they discover time travel in 1492?

Re:Pretty Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm afraid I'm too young to remember that.

Re:Pretty Neat

[Hurricane78]

It’s actually not me claiming that. It’s the German Wikipedia: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya#Die_Maya_heute
I basically just quoted the first sentence of that section.
Which itself does have the information from here: http://www.ethnologue.com/15/show_family.asp?subid=90711
The links an square brackets contain the population counts.

Where do you have your numbers from?

Re:Pretty Neat

[esmrg]

why did their civilization suddenly die out?

Are you actually serious with that question???

I believe the OP was making the common mistake of personifying the system instead of the people. That is common these days. However, the classic maya vanished before that, around 800 C.E. While the people didn't actually 'vanish', their way of life did. While it is possible that the maya became victims of their own overgrowth like the romans, subject to the law of diminishing returns, it seems more plausible they just abandoned it when it no longer served them. Perhaps the city was more a project or experiment than an exercise in domination and superiority like it was with the romans. The experiment served its purpose and then the people dispersed back into the jungle. It's unfortunate that most of what they learned and recorded during this time was destroyed by those invading peoples you mentioned.

Re:Pretty Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

There still waiting for the plumber to come back and finish the job he started before saying I'll be back next week!

Re:Pretty Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all: Population != Civilisation

Second: You're thinking of the Inca's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca). The Mayans had already collapsed before the Spanish arrived (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_civilization).

Re:Pretty Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

But wait, didn't you vote in the guy who wanted to end the war, not the guy who wanted it to last a century? What happened to that anyway? Surely he couldn't have caved to the lobbyists, he was going to curtail their power too. What happened to that anyway? Just another useful idiot I guess.

Re:Pretty Neat

[Jade_Wayfarer]

There's another interesting version of this story in Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" - book called "August", IIRC. Now I always think about the fall of the Roman Empire with a little chuckle.

Re:Pretty Neat

[T.E.D.]

Yeah, that's quite true. I play soccer with a couple in fact.

However, classical Mayan civilization actually had writing. By the time Europian explorers "discovered" them, there was lots of old written material lying around, but nobody still living in the area knew how to read any of it. The culture in that area at the time was quite illiterate. Going from literacy to illiteracy qualifies as a cultural collapse to most folks.

Of course, given the Spanish's attitude towards the codexes (they considered them abominations, and destroyed every one they could), it wouldn't exactly have been conductive to personal health to admit to being able to read them...

Re:Pretty Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

The Phantom Time Theory takes care of that. Those centuries never existed, allegedly.

Re:Pretty Neat

[BigBlueOx]

When we're talking about the "collapse" of the Maya, we usually mean the "collapse" of the Mayan classic civilization and that usually means the abandonment circa AD800 - 1000 of what might have been cities but which were, in my opinion, which is always correct, because I speak loudly in restaurants, really big haciendas that put The Ponderosa to shame. This has nothing to do with the disappearance of the Maya people (Van Daniken aside) or the disappearance of their language or culture. Hell, the Maya held out against the Spanish at Tayasal until 1697!

On top of that, we're usually confining our "collapse" or "disappearance" talk to the later sites like Tikal, Copan, Palenque and Chichen Itza while ignoring the older "collapse"s at El Mirador and Nakbe which followed the exact same pattern but happened hundreds of years before. We also like to utterly ignore Lamanai which happily rolled with no "collapse" at all.

To get a good feel for how the Maya "collapse" really happened try "The Fall Of The Ancient Maya" by David Webster. It's a very readable popular survey of a hideously complex subject. I'd give you the Amazon.com link but unfortunately this margin is too narrow to contain it.

Re:Pretty Neat

[jd]

I dunno. The Europeans turned them into Death Metal bands and Isle of Man TT racers.

Re:Pretty Neat

[jd]

Is it really that different from the Vikings, given the Nordic experiments in international trade? The British Empire also ran out of places to invade and ran out of ways to pay for a gigantic military infrastructure. If you look at the Hittite Empire, we still don't know much about the collapse other than their expansion started to decline and they plunged into a bunch of civil wars soon after.

I'm going to offer the following conjecture: that ANY militaristic power above a certain size, in order to survive, MUST grow OR collapse, that the cost of maintaining the military will exceed the disposable resources in the event of any unusual domestic expenditure, and that as the militaristic power grows, the size of event required to throw the system out-of-kilter grows smaller. Expansion (the confiscation of other people's disposable resources) is the only way to keep the power from disintegrating under the strain.

I'll offer a much more controversial conjecture as well: that ANY power of ANY kind, above a certain size, in which some specific domain provides a significant net drain on resources, will be equally unstable and MUST expand within that domain for the same reason as above. Thus, an intellectual society MUST expand knowledge fast enough to be able to cover the costs of that focus by borrowing from what the society is learning. An engineering society must further its skill in that domain continuously or implode.

To a lesser degree, this must also be true of any differences in abilities between any two fields, no matter what they are. The greater the gap, the greater the odds that society will run into a situation where one needs to borrow from the other to avert decay or collapse, but can't. It must also be true whether the gap is caused by excessive expansion in one area, OR excessive decline in another. You end up with a gap either way.

Thus, if this is correct, all other collapses of all other societies MUST eventually be traceable to distorted progress in some way, no matter what the primary cause is, what technology available is, or what kind of society it is. (If there exists even one collapse of any society anywhere at any time that cannot be shown to fit this pattern, then the generalization is invalid.)

From the above, and assuming nobody can think of a counter-example, I will propose one of the laws of Asimov's concept of Psychohistory: No matter what the details, the stability of a culture is inversely proportional to the RMS of the standard deviation of ability across all fields of endeavor with respect to all other fields of endeavor.

Re:Pretty Neat

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

What you say is true; but I suspect that Military collapses are substantially nastier and more common, for the following reasons:

First, getting locked into a downward trajectory is much easier when your historical expenditures have been military. In even modest quantities, unemployed ex-soldiers can be destabilizing. In large quantities, "government disbands army" turns into "army disbands government" with fair ease. Other sorts of expenditures can command considerable cultural clout, and maybe even manage a protest or two; but the military are pretty much the only ones with the power to say "No, actually, You are disbanded."

Second, militaries are some of the more tenuously profitable sectors of society. You have to be running a fairly cheap army, and have some weak, fat neighbors, for them to turn a direct profit. Not being invaded is valuable, to other sectors of society, if they are well developed; but the military specifically is a money pit unless conditions are excellent(and, because of point 1, they are hard to defund when conditions change).

History of the World Part I

[rattaroaz]

This reminds me of my favorite scene from History of the World, Part I

"Pump the shit, right out of your house!"

Re:History of the World Part I

[Anonymous Coward]

This reminds me of my favorite scene from History of the World, Part I

"Pump the shit, right out of your house!"

Heh - that was the first thing I thought of as well...

"It moves water through pipes! It's amazing!"

Re:SOLUTION? DEPORT ALL MUSLIMIICS

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps, but they appear to have more intelligence then you. They can spell in a 2'nd language. I have to say that I would prefer a number of educated Muslims over uneducated racists like you.

Egyptian Influence?

[SplicerNYC]

Didn't Thor Heyerdahl show that ancient people could have crossed the ocean with their level of technology? I think it's entirely possible that the Egyptians could have made the trip and influenced the technology of the New World.

Re:Egyptian Influence?

[oldhack]

That's right. Japanese invented time travel, and introduced Super Mario Brothers to the ancient Egyptians, and the rest is history.

Well, what happened to Roman civilization?

[IANAAC]

If anything this just adds to the mystery, if they had engineering knowledge of similar level to the Romans, why did their civilization suddenly die out?

Probably much like Roman civilization, the main power structure lost control. That seems to be recurring throughout all history and cultures.

Obviously that's a huge simplification, but it no doubt contributed to the "collapse" of their civilization. I put "collapse" in parentheses, because Mayan civilization still exists to a certain degree.

Re:SOLUTION? DEPORT ALL MUSLIMIICS

[Anonymous Coward]

Get them out before we have to endure more imcompetence. Is it any wonder the middle east is 3rd world? Those towelheads are to stipud to make a bumb even!

Careful, there. I have posted all sorts of horrible depraved "nigger" jokes, "Jew" jokes, and the like, and not one thing happened. Then I posted a joke about Muslims and Mohammad and *bam*, suddenly my IP address was blocked from Slashdot for several days. Slashdot even has a nice little webpage telling you that you've been blocked. Apparently the PC crowd has a lot of rampant favoritism, especially when one particular group gets its panties in a wad and bitches up a storm about everything a hell of a lot more than the others. Isn't it funny how it's considered cool to bash Christians and Judaeo-Christian beliefs in the media and Christians are expected to be adult enough to accept it and deal with it, but you make one negative remark about Islam and it suddenly doesn't work that way? AND no one sees this as a hypocritical double standard that needs to go?

Was their plumbing hero

[Dexter Herbivore]

Was their plumbing hero called Mario-coaxacatal?

Re:SOLUTION? DEPORT ALL MUSLIMIICS

[Anonymous Coward]

God no! Who'll run the 7 Elevens?

Re:SOLUTION? DEPORT ALL MUSLIMIICS

[Nutria]

Wow. Racist shitheads get smarter and smarter every day.

Unless he's reverse astroturfing.

Re:SOLUTION? DEPORT ALL MUSLIMIICS

[Nutria]

but you make one negative remark about Islam and it suddenly doesn't work that way?

Sure... They don't want their data centers to get bombed.

Tubes..

[Anonymous Coward]

Mayan's also had internet systems in place in what experts can only ascertain to be a series of tubes.

(commence beating the dead horse).

Plumbing?

[themoneyish]

It's not just plumbing.... All of this has happened before, and it'll all happen again.

Re:Plumbing?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just plumbing.... All of this has happened before, and it'll all happen again.

Yeah, that's about what I got out of that James Spader flick too.

Re:SOLUTION? DEPORT ALL MUSLIMIICS

[PitaBred]

It's hypocritical to an extent, but then again, the Jews and Christians typically don't threaten to kill you or follow through on their threats. I blame the moderate Muslims who say almost nothing against their extremist brethren. Other Christians put George Tiller in jail. Why is Osama still free?

Re:SOLUTION? DEPORT ALL MUSLIMIICS

[PitaBred]

Er, George Tiller's killer. I should really use the Preview button for previewing.

News for nerds..

[Anonymous Coward]

..flush that matters.

Next on Ghost Hunters...

[ProteusQ]

In ancient Mayan sewers, the team comes face-to-face with the ghosts of Mayan Roto-Rooter men!

Ironic, true, but still a load of crap...

Re:SOLUTION? DEPORT ALL MUSLIMIICS

[Anonymous Coward]

but you make one negative remark about Islam and it suddenly doesn't work that way?

Sure... They don't want their data centers to get bombed.

Isn't that like saying that Muslims are a bunch of uncivilzied savages who immediately use violence as their first move when someone says something they don't like? Does this perception come from all of the terrorism that has happened in the last few years that involved a small minority of very extremist Muslims? If so then why don't people fear criticising Christians after the small minority of extremists who were in the IRA? You see that something here just doesn't add up.

Re:SOLUTION? DEPORT ALL MUSLIMIICS

[electrosoccertux]

Get them out before we have to endure more imcompetence. Is it any wonder the middle east is 3rd world? Those towelheads are to stipud to make a bumb even!

Careful, there. I have posted all sorts of horrible depraved "nigger" jokes, "Jew" jokes, and the like, and not one thing happened. Then I posted a joke about Muslims and Mohammad and *bam*, suddenly my IP address was blocked from Slashdot for several days. Slashdot even has a nice little webpage telling you that you've been blocked. Apparently the PC crowd has a lot of rampant favoritism, especially when one particular group gets its panties in a wad and bitches up a storm about everything a hell of a lot more than the others. Isn't it funny how it's considered cool to bash Christians and Judaeo-Christian beliefs in the media and Christians are expected to be adult enough to accept it and deal with it, but you make one negative remark about Islam and it suddenly doesn't work that way? AND no one sees this as a hypocritical double standard that needs to go?

Wow, that's really interesting. Thanks for sharing.

archaeologist + hydrologist =

[RevWaldo]

a pharaoh faucet major.

.

Re:SOLUTION? DEPORT ALL MUSLIMIICS

[Anonymous Coward]

Cuz Osama looks like Muhamid so that is why. even has the twolwe

Life of Mayan...

[Ponyegg]

What have the Mayans every done for us?

Re:Life of Mayan...

[Ponyegg]

Apart from spell 'ever' properly... bugger, perfectly decent gag knackered by my itchy posting finger.

On a related news...

[alfredos]

Mayans are still dealing with the old telephone monopoly and trying to figure out how to get decent competition in that sector.

Intellectual giant, huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Says the guy who doesn't know the difference between a freshwater lake and an ocean.

Re:SOLUTION? DEPORT ALL MUSLIMIICS

[Anonymous Coward]

The IRA were trying to reunify Ireland, and were handing out death sentences to those who occupied their country not those who blasphemed their religion.

However the viewpoint of muslims as violent stems from a general ignorance of Islam coupled with western media coverage of Muslims being limited to the the Middle East and also being generally confined to reporting on sensationalism such as fatwas made by extremist nutjobs and the violent tensions in and surrounding Israel and extrapolating these to Muslims worldwide.

Muslims are terrorists just like Catholics are pedos and the youth of today are degenerates. The media told me so.

Re:SOLUTION? DEPORT ALL MUSLIMIICS

[Anonymous Coward]

Pics or it didn't happen.

(Seriously, are Slashdotters really so gullible as to believe random AC's scare stories? And I'm saying that as a random AC myself!)

42

[ThatsNotPudding]

why did their civilization suddenly die out?

They unwisely got rid of all the telephone sterilizer technicians.

Re:SOLUTION? DEPORT ALL MUSLIMIICS

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, double standard. If they have a god that requires such shit heads to defend it then fuck their god.

I've Been to Palenque

[flythebike]

Really amazing place, off the beaten path, near another amazing place, Aqua Azul. Ancient, lush, unique. Only pyramid in the Americas where they buried a king inside a pyramid. As for what happened to it, I believe that there was quite a lot of warring amongst the various Mayan city states-it had nothing to do with plumbing.

So if the Mayan's had plumbing

[sizzzzlerz]

may I assume they originated the plumber's butt crack?

So you're saying...

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Their civilization went down the tubes?

Nononono.

[jd]

The aliens gave the Mayans BluRay DVDs. That's why the calendars are round, and why when the Spaniards burned the licenses the disks became unreadable.

Re:SOLUTION? DEPORT ALL MUSLIMIICS

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucking sandniggers! (testing the ip blocked thing.)
They are nothing but ignorant Pussies whom could not tell there dads to fuck off; and then go learn a new world intelligence.
When your schools are thousands of years behind in "social teachings" then you are doomed to fail in the long run.
As far as the 70+ virgins; I bet their all children are raped at birth or within a few years of it. Not a virgin to be found anywhere.

The Women of their world need to "STAND UP AND BE COUNTED!!"
Change your world before it's to late for your children.

~Teach your Children well~

Weather

[minstrelmike]

Rome collapsed due to weather. Its collapse started around 100CE which is when the cold spell started. Europe recoved and repopulated itself when the weather warmed up about 700CE.
The Anasazi civilization in the US collapsed during a drought around 1200 CE. They of course had chiefs (kings) and tribes (nations) and fought wars amongst themselves like Europeans but because we have names and dates for Europe, we think the king is who caused the war and ignore the weather that caused a climate of migration and warfare across the whole continent.

The Maya civilization collapsed due to weather. Either 1) they had bad weather (drought empties water pipes) or 2) some other group 2a) had bad weather and migrated into the territory or 2b) good weather which increased their population and they migrated into the area.

Re:SOLUTION? DEPORT ALL MUSLIMIICS

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, of all the groups you mention, Muslims are the only group to routinely resort to violence and murder in response to criticism; Slashdot probably doesn't want to draw that kind of scrutiny. Violence can be a very effective deterrent to free speech.

Polls!!

[rubycodez]

we should have some virginity/sexuality slashdot polls, to see if the results roughly correlate to any slashdot stereotypes (yes, that means results have at least 50% probability of being nonsense, but fun 100% certain)

Poll I:
Age at Loss of Virginity
1. under 15
2. under 17
3. under 19
4. under 21
5. under 25
6. over 25
7. still a virgin, you insensitive clod!
8. cowboyneal popped my cherry

Total number of sexual partners to date (self or dolls/toys don't count)
1. 0
2. 1
3. 2 - 3
4. 4 - 6
5. 7 - 10
6. 11 - 19
7. 20 or more

you could be right

[Anonymous Coward]

there is a deep relation between plumbing and edible wheat. although if your grain was growing an aquatic environment to begin with, like rice, then you could separate it with the avail water sooner.

but for everyone at home, try this experiment. take some rice(our substitute seeing loose rice is probably more common that fresh wheat grains) and scatter it on the ground (i did it inside, probably just as pedagogical as outside, even a dirty sink could do). then try to rescue the lost rice.

if you scoop it up and collect it in a cup you can mix it with water, wash it, and then basically clear the sediment etc from your food. its been shown that this cultural behaviour recently spread through apes. but having plumbing could be related cause avail of water means that the food could be collected and transported independently from being cleaned. decentralising the cleaning of the food grains, and allowing the overall network to expand. this thought brought to you by w33d.

Re:SOLUTION? DEPORT ALL MUSLIMIICS

[drkim]

"to make a bumb"

...this is funnier if you read it aloud in the Peter Sellers/Inspector Clouseau voice.
"A what?
"A bumb! A BUMB!! "