- 21 hours ago
While we're watching Mayan people, Nimoy explains that their hearts are unusually slow, their teeth don't decay and their cranial cavities are weird shapes.
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00:00The heart of an average human being beats 72 times a minute.
00:07These, however, are not ordinary human beings.
00:10They are the Mayans.
00:12Their hearts beat only 50 times a minute.
00:15Their teeth do not decay.
00:18Their skull cavities are different from any other human beings.
00:22They are the descendants of an extraordinary people
00:25who long ago created an astonishing civilization.
00:29Then, they vanished.
00:32Where did they come from?
00:34Why did their civilization flourish, then disappear?
00:59This ancient observatory suggests a knowledge of astronomy
01:09that rivals anything we know today.
01:11Yet, it was built more than a thousand years ago.
01:14Who designed it?
01:18Where did they get their knowledge?
01:21Most puzzling of all, where did they go?
01:27Where did they go?
01:34This series presents information based in part on theory and conjecture.
01:39The producer's purpose is to suggest some possible explanation,
01:43but not necessarily the only ones, to the mysteries we will examine.
01:48The biblical story of Genesis and the theory of evolution agree.
01:56In the beginning, out of the void came light.
01:59The great creative force.
02:01Eventually, light separated from darkness, becoming the first day.
02:13And from this great expanse, the sky was created and dry land emerged from the deep.
02:20Earth, the great mother.
02:25Giving birth to all kinds of vegetation, the marsh and mud landscape was transformed into mountains and lakes.
02:39Finally, the expanse of sky was filled with lights, separating day from night.
02:44The movement of the stars marked the passage of time, the recurring cycles of the days, the seasons, the years.
02:54The waters brought forth life.
03:04Swarms of living creatures filled the seas.
03:12Birds and other winged life filled the skies.
03:27All sorts of beasts and crawling things populated the land.
03:32It was into this setting that mankind was born.
03:42Living simply at first, mankind grappled with the problems of survival, seeking warmth and the guidance of the stars.
04:10Building only the simplest of shelters against the elements.
04:17In most cases, civilization developed slowly, but there appears to be an exception.
04:29Deep within the jungles of Mexico and Guatemala, a culture emerged unlike any other.
04:36At Tikal, the sacred heart of the Mayan world, pyramids stand as ancient links between earth and sky.
04:45Why did this ancient people build such elaborate ceremonial complexes?
04:52Pre-Columbian scholar and poet Al Urista believes the Maya to be the oldest culture in the world.
04:58The pyramids that these people built were centers of learning.
05:04There were places where men and women were to become creators, masters of energy, masters of matter and energy.
05:11People who would learn in those centers how to transform matter and energy.
05:16There were also initiatory chambers, not open to everybody.
05:21These secret societies were dedicated to the study of astronomy based on mathematics.
05:26No evidence has been found to explain the Mayan advances in astronomy and mathematics.
05:33The silent sentinels they left behind indicate only the methods they used to mark the passage of time.
05:45They could easily compute the exact day of the week a given date would fall 400 million years later.
05:58Ancient Mayans devised a unique numbering system.
06:01They used dots to signify one, bars for five, and a simple stylized shell for zero.
06:08Thus they anticipated our decimal system by thousands of years.
06:13In 1947, Giles Healy did an extraordinary discovery.
06:24In a small temple in a seemingly unimportant religious center called Bonampak,
06:29Healy found a gold mine of information about Mayan ceremonial life.
06:38In three small chambers, he uncovered a series of exquisite murals
06:42documenting the pageantry of a thousand-year-old religion.
06:53The murals tell of a grand processional of music and masked dancers
06:57who appear to be impersonating mysterious gods,
07:00perhaps in the hopes of winning their favor.
07:03There is a raid on a nearby village.
07:08Captives are taken.
07:13Prisoners sacrificed.
07:18Significantly, there is always present one commanding figure, the priest astronomer.
07:37The palace observatory at Palenque reveals the priests to be preoccupied with the study of the stars
07:42and preserving the ancient sacred mysteries.
07:45Long before Columbus, Mayan men of knowledge filled libraries with hundreds of books on their history
07:53and the complex cycles of the planets.
07:57These books were important because the priests believed that history repeats itself.
08:02Carefully recorded events were, for them, a guide to the future.
08:09The Mayan written language is still largely undeciphered.
08:13One day, it might provide answers to some puzzling questions.
08:17This toy crocodile is evidence that the wheel was known to the early Mayans,
08:22but they made no practical use of it.
08:24Why?
08:27The priest scientist directed the building of an elaborate road system.
08:32The longest cuts an absolutely straight line 62 miles through the jungle.
08:41One wonders about the spiritual motivation behind the construction of this complex network linking sacred cities.
08:48One road ends at Uxmal, the oldest Mayan city in the Yucatan Peninsula.
08:57It can be seen as a colossal monument to one thing, the snake.
09:02Al Urista explains.
09:04The basic assumptions about life in the universe were that nothing is static on Earth.
09:12Everything moves, and everything that moves has a measure.
09:17And everything that has a measure moves in a spiral.
09:20Nothing moves in a straight line.
09:22This is the way they conceived energy, and that's why they call themselves the Chan Clan.
09:27Chan simply means snake.
09:28In the north, the snake cult reached its greatest power.
09:39Symbolized by a new god called Cucucan, the feathered serpent.
09:46Mayan folklore holds that Cucucan was a bearded, light-skinned man
09:50who brought a renaissance to citadels like Chichen Itza,
09:54and provided the Mayans with a highly advanced knowledge of engineering and astronomy.
10:01From Chichen Itza's observatory, the Mayan priests, it was said,
10:06read the future in the patterns of the stars.
10:08In ancient times, Chichen Itza was a thriving ceremonial center, a place of pilgrimage,
10:24where Mayans came to worship and enjoy society.
10:26While the priests were careful to attend to their civic responsibilities,
10:39they were forever seeking ways to provide spiritual guidance for their subjects.
10:44To that end, Cucucan erected a perfect calendar temple.
10:48A pyramid with 364 steps leading up to the temple,
10:57which represents the 365th day of the tropical year.
11:01Legend has it that Cucucan understood the power of the snake.
11:05He thus translated this power and energy into a recurring architectural phenomenon.
11:13Twice a year, on the spring and fall equinox at precisely 5 p.m.,
11:18the sun reveals a serpent slithering down the temple's balustrade,
11:22dramatically announcing the end of one seasonal cycle and the beginning of another.
11:29According to legend, the enlightened Cucucan disappears and black sorcerers come from the north.
11:36At the sacred well, archaeologists have dredged up hundreds of human bones.
11:42The Mayans believed that only the most perfect children were pure enough for the gods.
11:48Ancient Mayans played the first known team sport in history.
11:54For them, it had terrifying consequences.
11:58It was played by priests on a huge ball court linked astronomically to a map of the heavens.
12:04Without using hands or feet, the object was to send a rubber ball through a small ring set high on the wall.
12:10Winning was so rare that victors were rewarded with all the spectator's possessions.
12:17Losing meant that the players were put to death.
12:21Then it appears that suddenly the priests left the temples.
12:33Did Mayan astronomers see a different age in the stars?
12:37Was it the end of a cosmic cycle?
12:39No one knows for sure.
12:43It is a strange and fascinating puzzle.
12:46The answer may be found in an incredible drama played out in an obscure place by men who served a different god.
12:53The ancient Mayans abandoned their sacred cities hundreds of years before the arrival of the Spanish in the New World.
13:09When the Spaniards came, they were awed by the architectural triumph of Mayan cities and at the same time mystified by the radically different people who had built them.
13:22The coming of the Spanish friars cemented the Spanish conquest of the Yucatan.
13:32The conquistadores came to battle foreign soldiers.
13:36The friars came to battle foreign gods.
13:38Gathering up all the Mayan archives, all the chronicles of this ancient wisdom, the friars came together at Mani.
13:53Alarista laments the occasion.
13:56The Mayan books were burnt during the conquest by the religious seal of the Christians led by Bishop Landa.
14:06This is a terrible catastrophe given the fact that the Mayans constitute the oldest civilization in the world.
14:14It's interesting to note that that religious seal, that antagonism against Mayan knowledge, was sourced in the Mayan use of the snake.
14:27The Christians associated the snake with the devil.
14:31And seeing that the Mayans had the snake in every single one of their sculptures, in every single one of their halls, in their clothing, in their jewelry, they concluded that these people were children of the devil and that any information or knowledge associated with these people was obviously the knowledge of the devil that had to be destroyed.
14:51Now the conquest was utter and complete.
15:05The destruction of Mayan knowledge was ruthless and would forever frustrate scholars by its loss.
15:13If there was ever a key to the mysterious hieroglyphic writing, it is gone and we are left to speculate about the strange disappearance of this remarkable civilization.
15:22Some scholars have suggested that the Mayan leadership was decimated by malaria and yellow fever, yet these diseases seem to have been unknown in ancient times.
15:38Others contend that the priests were cast out by rebellious elements within the empire, but there is no archaeological evidence to support that conclusion.
15:46Another possible explanation is that the Mayans moved to escape a natural catastrophe, perhaps an earthquake. The area is known for them.
15:59Guatemala City sits on a 40 million year old fault. On February 4th, 1976, at 3.04 am, the earth shook with such a violence that it resulted in one of the worst disasters to ever hit the western hemisphere.
16:14Ninety times stronger than the quake that leveled Managua, Nicaragua in 1972, it was felt along a 2,000-mile strip of Central America, right through the heart of the ancient Mayan world.
16:28The quake fractured the land, reducing a great city to rubble. It destroyed 20% of all buildings and left more than a million homeless.
16:37In the end, 23,000 died. Yet even with such a history of earthquakes, people do not seem to have been discouraged from building and settling along this ancient fault line.
16:57Some believe that the Mayans abandoned their land because of crop failure. They simply depleted the soil and had to move on.
17:10For thousands of years, Mayan peasants have been beating back the jungle, burning out corn fields.
17:17Even today, corn makes up 80% of the Mayan diet. Crop failure is a horrendous disaster. But Al Arista is unconvinced. He dismisses such easy explanations as earthquake and crop failure.
17:33The pre-scientists were able to predict earthquakes as well as the kind of weather conditions that would be propitious for a specific kernel of corn.
17:42And there were 28 kernels of corn developed for specific weather conditions.
17:50These people had developed a socialist, a communistic society, where everything that was raised by the people was distributed to the people according to their needs.
18:10Others have suggested that changing climate could account for the sudden disappearance of the ancient Mayans.
18:15Al Arista also believes this unlikely.
18:18They also use psychic energy in order to attract clouds in the event of drought, so that the idea of rain dance is not really a very far out idea if you understand it in terms of psychic energy.
18:33The Mayas had a very good reason for building their pyramids on these energy grids.
18:40The Mayas had a very good reason for building their pyramids on these energy grids because this enabled them to awaken psychic energy within initiates that came to these art centers.
18:52The Mayas disappeared mysteriously, but they did not leave the earth.
19:02They simply concluded a cycle of civilization and took off to the east.
19:10The journey to the east starts right here in the peninsula of Yucatan.
19:14It is from this peninsula that they crossed the sea, stop in Egypt into the Red Sea, go up towards Nepal.
19:22It was there that they started their second cycle of civilization.
19:27One of the colonies of the Maya Isaiah was to be found at the foot of the Dead Sea, where the monastery of the Essenes was located.
19:46It was there that Jesus learned about the philosophy of the world.
19:50Malarista offers a startling conclusion.
19:54The last words of Christ on the cross were not Aramaic words.
20:00They were stylized Mayan words.
20:03And they did not mean, O God, why have thou forsaken me?
20:07They meant, at last I sink in the dawn of your presence.
20:12Today, little survives of the old practices and beliefs.
20:25For a civilization once first among all those in the world, there remains only ruins and a cave, an ancient house of worship.
20:34The priestly knowledge it contained is lost, forgotten.
20:38Perhaps the ancient Mayans anticipated this when they wrote long ago,
20:54all moons, all years, all days, all winds take their course and pass away.
21:03The ancient Mayans, men of knowledge, conceived their time on Earth, their cycle of civilization, to be 5,200 years.
21:18Beginning their calendar August 12th, 3113 BC, they predicted that on December 24th, 2011 AD, a cataclysmic earthquake would terminate their cycle of civilization.
21:33New men of knowledge would then appear to fight the forces of evil and lead the people to create a world government.
21:41If the Mayan men of knowledge were right, in just 34 years, we may learn the answers to some of the ancient Mayan mysteries.
21:53Lost civilizations, extraterrestrials, myths and monsters, missing persons, magic and witchcraft, unexplained phenomena.
22:12In search of cameras are traveling the world seeking out these great mysteries.
22:17This program was the result of the work of scientists, researchers and a group of highly skilled technicians.
22:24Dr.
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