Unique Mayan find puts paid to doomsday theories

Archeologists working in Guatemala have found a small room amid Mayan ruins where royal scribes apparently used walls like a blackboard to keep track of astronomical records and the society's intricate calendar some 1,200 years ago.

This is considered a striking find, as it is the oldest of Mayan astronomical tables to be found so far.

Astronomical records were a key to the Mayan calendar, which has received attention recently because of doomsday warnings that the Maya predicted the end of the world this December.

Experts say the calendar makes no such prediction. The calculations in the new finding involve a time span longer than 6,000 years; thousands of years in the future. They would not have bothered with such a long time-span if they thought the world was going to end in 2012, the experts say.

The Maya at Xultún were likely less concerned with the end of the world than the end of their world, according to Mayan-writing expert David Freidel of Washington University in St Louis.

For ninth-century Maya, tabulating astronomical calendars to predict times of plenty was akin to gauging the stock market today, Freidel, who wasn't involved in the new study, told National Geographic.