Mayan Calendar Finally Ended Forever, No Room for Further Doomsday Prophecies (Video)

Thanks to carbon-dating, owtherwise known as a variety of radioactive dating that is applicable only to matter that was once living and presumed to be in equilibrium with the atmosphere, a structural beam from a Guatemalan temple confirms that the Mayan Long Count calendar did, in fact, end on December 2012. Guess what that means, folks? No more room for doomsday!

According to The Discovery Channel, the Long Count is a complex system of bars and dots that consist of five time units: Bak'tun (144,000 days); K'atun (7,200 days), Tun (360 days), Winal (20 days) and K'in (one day), which are counted from a mythological starting point.

Beginning around 600 to 900 A.D., the Long Count is believed to have proliferated more than 40 different centers across the Mayan lowlands and was used as an anchor to major historical events in time.

Yet many historical events comprising of royal successions, rituals, victories and defeats can't be determined by scholars. And by the time of the 16^th century, the Spanish colonizers destroyed most evidence that correlated to the Maya calendar.

 "Many solutions to the problem have been proposed, employing a variety of historical and astronomical data," an international team of researchers led by Douglas J. Kennett, professor of environmental archaeology at Pennsylvania State University, according to the journal Scientific Reports.

Kennett's team looked at carved wooden beams from a temple in the ancient Maya city of Tikal to help more easily understand the calendar.

The carvings depict Tikal's king, known as Jasaw Chan K'awiil. A related text describes his defeat of King Yich'aak K'ahk' , known as "Claw of Fire," from a rival kingdom at Calakmul.

With a combination of high-resolution accelerator mass spectrometry carbon-14 dates and a statistical model of tree growth rates estimated from changing calcium concentrations, the researchers established that the lintel was carved sometime around 658-696 A.D.

The estimate close matches that of the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson (GMT) correlation, which was initially created by Joseph Goodman in the early 1900s. 

This estimate indicates that K'awiil's victory occurred around 695-712 A.D., which was determined in the 1950s by carbon dating from the wooden beams found in Tikal. 

The researchers believe that discrepancies may be explained by a beam whicn the tree was taken from called the sapotilla, which would have taken years to carve. 

The date of the Mayan battle would work like a Rosetta stone for the chronology of the ancient civilization.

"Anything that has a Mayan date on it, we can be more certain about what the European date is," said Kennett, according to U.S. News & World Report.

This information may suggest that climate change played a role in both the development and demise of the Maya. 

In turn, it also means that the end of the 13th Mayan Bak'tun really did happen last year - without any apocalyptic effect as many had predicted.

"The exact date when the Bak'tun changed is open to question, but we know that it was somewhere in December," Kennett said.

Want to find out more about the Mayan Calendar? Check out this video, courtesy of YouTube.