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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."
Wonder if their shower temperatures went loopy when they flushed their toilets too?
No , they sacrificed virgins to prevent that.
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.
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".
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.
Don't say that on Slashdot!
Some people might get nervous around here....