Or something…
So the Maya calendar had a 5100 ish year cycle. There’s a long grand cycle that’s the precessional cycle of 26,868 years, that gets subdivided into 5100 ish year groups.
The wiki has more on the Maya calendar than anyone could want, and in a particularly useless format:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_calendar
Hardly any evidence for a reason to panic in the whole thing. Heck, down at the bottom it even has a list of cycles including some that are 3,154,071 years and even 63,081,429 years. What good is a 3 Million or 63 Million year cycle for a modern Doomsayer?
Though it does have one ‘useful’ date:
A different calendar was used to track longer periods of time, and for the inscription of calendar dates (i.e., identifying when one event occurred in relation to others). This is the Long Count. It is a count of days since a mythological starting-point. According to the correlation between the Long Count and Western calendars accepted by the great majority of Maya researchers (known as the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson, or GMT, correlation), this starting-point is equivalent to August 11, 3114 BCE in the proleptic Gregorian calendar or 6 September in the Julian calendar (−3113 astronomical). The GMT correlation was chosen by John Eric Sydney Thompson in 1935 on the basis of earlier correlations by Joseph Goodman in 1905 (August 11), Juan Martínez Hernández in 1926 (August 12), and Thompson himself in 1927 (August 13). By its linear nature, the Long Count was capable of being extended to refer to any date far into the past or future. This calendar involved the use of a positional notation system, in which each position signified an increasing multiple of the number of days. The Maya numeral system was essentially vigesimal (i.e., base-20), and each unit of a given position represented 20 times the unit of the position which preceded it. An important exception was made for the second-order place value, which instead represented 18 × 20, or 360 days, more closely approximating the solar year than would 20 × 20= 400 days. It should be noted however that the cycles of the Long Count are independent of the solar year.
Though I note in passing that we’re mired in the whole Gregorian vs Julian vs “whatever” calendar alignment “issues” all over again… But in any case, it’s about 3114 BC. So what was going on in 3100 BC? Might we catch a bit of clue from that?
Oh, and I note in passing that the Maya had a base 20 number system too…. Just like the Celts. Hmmmmm…..
So this site has much more dramatic material, more suited to appropriate excess of imagination:
http://www.onereed.com/articles/3000bc1.html
The ancient Maya were very good astronomers. They knew about the precession of the equinoxes and divided the full 26,868-year cycle into fifths. They had calculated well ahead of time that the winter solstice point would shift to the center of the Milky Way, a point very close to the Galactic Center, around 2012 A.D. In recent years we have heard much about the Mayan Calendar and its “end date” of 12/21/2012. In truth, that date is not really an ending, but it does mark the completion of a 5,125-year cycle, 1/5 of the precession cycle (the so-called Long Count) that began on August 12, 3114 B.C.
Another calendar, probably also based on precession, comes out of ancient India. In this calendar each half of the precessional cycle was divided into four parts called Yugas, or ages. The first age, called the Kali Yuga, is said to have begun on February 18, 3,102 B.C., only eleven years after the start of the Mayan Long Count. While many writers disagree on the exact length of a Yuga, the starting point is generally agreed upon. It is a strange coincidence, indeed, that two ancient civilizations on opposite sides of the earth would both locate the beginnings of an age at nearly the same point in time.
Now that’s more like it! Mystical connections between cultures on oppose sides of the world, with no POSSIBLE way to communicate (ignore those stellar and celestial coordinating events!).
OK, so we’ve got a 3100 BC date for “interesting things”… So what’s that look like?
11,000 years of temperatures
Original and larger images, or click this one for a modestly larger image
Well, looks like just after that hot spike, things plunge into Horrible Cold!! (Ignore that nothing so interesting happens at 10,200 BP as happen at 5100 BP, we were just coming out of a glacial then, so clearly it was just too old to matter ;-)
No, what matters to us is that there was a relative hot spike, then a cold plunge. So the only acceptable interpretation of things is that 21 December 2012 marks the end of the current Hot Cycle and the start of the plunge into cold. AGW is going to be whacked then, and Skeptics will be the New Priesthood of Truth! Yea! Then we all freeze to death. (Bummer… Hey, don’t blame me, I’m just reading the entrails, not contributing them! )
So any other tenuous parallels we can make between 3100 BC / 5100 BP and now?
Of the few periods that stand out against the backdrop of human history, 3100 B.C. (+/- 100 years) is the most enigmatic. Few records survive to give us details about specific events that occurred at this time, but we do know that whatever happened then was of major consequence. It’s possible that this period marks most important and decisive time in the entire history of civilization.
Oh Dear! “Enigmatic” is not a word you want to hear in terms of historical cycles. It usually means some really ‘bad shit’ happened and folks were too busy learning how to cook “Long Pig” to write a lot of history books…
We are told by most textbooks that history began around 3000 B.C. in Mesopotamia. This is a generally accepted approximate date for the Early Dynasty period of the Sumerians, the first of several civilizations in Mesopotamia. All the traits of high civilization appeared there almost simultaneously; the wheel, metallurgy, astrology, astronomy, calendars, taxation, bookkeeping, and an organized priesthood. One very important Sumerian development, that archaeologists and historians date to the late fourth mil-lennium (close to 3100 B.C.), was the writing of texts. The Sumerians of Mesopotamia had perfected a means of recording numbers and ideaographs on clay (cuneiform tablets) about this time. Apparently, the transition from pictographs to far more abstract ideaographs did not occur slowly, it occurred quite suddenly.
After thousands of years of gradual development, Ancient Egypt as we know it came into being with the union of Upper and Lower Egypt and the start of the First Dynasty under Menes, king of Upper Egypt. This event is said to have occurred somewhere around 3100 B.C. Although some scholars believe that the unification of Egypt actually took place during the course of several generations, ancient writers point to one man, Menes, who pulled it together all at once. According to most Egyptologists, the Great Pyramid was constructed a few hundred years later, around 2500 B.C. during the Fourth Dynasty. Some writers, however, believe that the Great Pyramid was begun much earlier, closer to 3,000 B.C. When it was built, this greatest of ancient monuments was carefully aligned to certain stars, and some of these alignments suggest this earlier date. Dating by star alignments is possible because of a slow shift of the stars against the Cardinal directions (true east, west, north, and south) called the precession of the equinoxes.(1) We will hear more about precession later.
Stonehenge in England has long fascinated researchers. The earliest structures of this remarkable stone circle, the bank and ditch, the Heel Stone, and the Aubrey Stones, have been dated to around 3000 B.C. It was about a thousand years later that the familiar bluestones were added. It was also around 3100 B.C. (+/-100 years) that stone circle building and other types of megalithic structures were being built throughout Britain, Scotland, and Ireland. New Grange, the large passage-grave in Ireland, is generally dated to about 3200 B.C.
So we had a whole lot of “New Empires” rising. But from what? Classical history says “from primitive wild man”. Yet we know that 12,000 BP there were folks making monumental architecture in Turkey. Hmmmm…. So on no more evidence than that, we can presume “The END of Empires of Today!” Global collapse. To be followed by the creation of clay tablet writing (as all our electronic and paper records rot away…) and someone will start making beer and found civilization (again!)…
But at least there will be a henge…
Anyone have a few acres, a budget for about 1000 tons of reinforced concrete, and a sense of humor? Ive got a Henge to build and time is running out!
If it is true that 3100 B.C. or thereabouts was a time of pro-found change and development in many parts of the world, then one would logically suspect some sort of global cause. Major alterations in climate may have been a factor. The geologic record shows that the later part of the fourth millennium (about 3500 to 3000 B.C.) was a time of active volcanism. Frequent volcanic eruptions during that time produced dust that settled in the atmosphere, cooling down temperatures worldwide. Volcanic dust affects climate unevenly. It tends to lower the temperatures at the high latitudes more than those at the tropics. Cooler temperatures to the north may have started migrations, which in turn disturbed established settlements located at lower latitudes. There were two other major waves of volcanic activity in historical times: 500 to 200 B.C. and 1500 to 1900 A.D., and both were periods of tremendous activity and change in cultures and civilizations all over the world.
Another possibility is that some 5,000 years ago the earth passed through the core of a swarm of meteors created by a collapsing comet. In this kind of scenario, showers of meteors, visible even in daylight, would strike the Earth at a specific time each year for many years in a row.(3) Such a phenomena would certainly be disturbing, especially psychologically, for humans everywhere. This alone could have stimulated unprecedented changes in consciousness and awareness. Who knows what the shamans and priests had to say about this fire in the sky. Were their explanations and solutions behind the great architectural projects, migrations, or conquests?
Oh Boy! Volcanoes and Meteors!
OK, I’m ready. I can take it. What’s a little volcano or meteor swarm or two! It’s got to be less a bother than Obamacare and certainly better than Socialism Lite!
So I’m ready for my consciousness raising awareness enhancing volcanic meteoric plunge into a cold epiphany. At least, as long as they take plastic and have dental coverage…
But at least they don’t have any Space Aliens…
During the 1970s Erich Von Dankien’s “Chariots of the Gods” stirred up all sorts of questions about alien visits during ancient times. The public reaction to his ideas was very strong and astronomers responded by publishing books that showed how sloppy his reasoning was. More recently, Zecharia Sitchin has written and published a series of books postulating recurring visits of aliens from a 12th planet. According to Sitchin, these distant visitors enslaved humanity, but in the process they also accelerated our evolution.
These ideas, which often mesmerize the uncritical and incur the wrath of skeptics, are really not so far-out as they seem. As all three authors point out, the Old Testament of the Bible is full of very strange stuff indeed. For example, what did Ezekiel really see and who are the angels? Aside from the Bible there are other ancient writings that suggest our interpretations of ancient history may need to be more complex than we suspect. One of the most intriguing references comes from the Egyptian historian Manetho who says “the Watchers who had descended to earth in the general cosmic year 1000, held converse with men, and taught them that the orbits of the two luminaries, being marked by the 12 signs of the Zodiac, are composed of 360 parts.” The idea here is that astrology was brought to earth by intelligent beings from somewhere else.
“Enslaved hunanity”? Oh DAMN it! That’s just not what I had in mind… Can I have the “Watchers” descending to earth instead? Folks who ‘held converse with men”? Maybe we can trade them some beer for heaters to hold off the plunge into cold…
Musings from the Chiefio 
I’m thinking that if the “watchers” descended to earth, we now have the firepower to wipe them out, because we can!
I hope we aren’t going of the cold cliff, I hate cold.
I just wish people kept better records so we don’t have to guess about things, there should be government regulation n this stuff!
Seems to me the world is doing a pretty good job of destroying itself on it’s own. It doesn’t any help. If i where a ‘Watcher’ i’d sit up there laughing my ass off, all the nasty work is being done for you by your prospective victims/slaves.
I am not a fan of these kinds of predictions but the narrative put up by Chiefio is full of interesting stuff. Always with these cosmic alignments there is the insinuation that a switch will be triggered which is obviously not possible but there can be long term changes linked to the cosmos. Perhaps that’s where Ice Ages and the like come from.
Does anyone remember Velikovsky? He , like Von Daniken managed to enthuse the crowd with his thinking and of course L Ron Hubbard who parlayed his science fiction into Scientology.
I do agree that the civilisational “jumps” seem to have happened right around the world at much the same times and that does argue for climatic disruptions globally. It is rather nice to surmise that those civilisations all those millennia ago had advanced technologically to the extent we have only to be knocked down by that old nemesis, the weather.
[Reply: Did you notice the ‘humor’ tag? Not so much a ‘prediction’ as a muse… -E.M.Smith ]
E.M.S.
try the Ness of Brodgar in the Shetland islands, where recent finds are indicating a more advanced society than previously thought. Some have called the finds “bigger than Stonehenge”.
Skara Brae, the nearby prehistoric village remains, show those “primitives” had running water in their houses, live (sea)food storage and writing. Dated about 2800BC, although some guess a possible start around 3500BC.
Try Google also
http://www.orkneyjar.com/archaeology/nessofbrodgar/
Does this mean that in 4 weeks time every event will be proof of the Mayan calender prophecies, the same as Anthropogenic Global Warming prophets are doing now!
Chiefio Pay attention to the two comets that are set to appear next year, If they get bright enough order in extra popcorn!
I can remember reading Erich Von Dankien’s “Chariots of the Gods” – I still have copies of his books here. I was rather disappointed that the people who rubbished his ideas, failed to supply ones of their own about the artifacts that the books described. Especially the tunnels in Peru and Ecuador that were pictured in his book – flat sided corridors running large distances into hills with large chambers cut into the hills. He also reported skeletons with ‘discs’ with markings that had not been decoded.
If we take the repeated asteroid/meteor reports above and perhaps throw in something like a Carrington event or two. What would happen if they occurred in the middle of next month to our current civilization? I would expect that some would survive. There are the survivalists who in another five thousand years could be found inside tunnels or fallout shelters. If that was followed by say multiple small asteroid strikes every 12 months for 5 or 6 years and a rapid climate shift of some sort as happened with the Sahara going from rain forest to desert around 3000BC – what would be left of the current civilization? Say its 20 years on – and you and survivors want to leave messages for anyone who comes later – no paper, no power and they may not speak your language how would you do it? Ideograms like those on Pioneer? Where would you put stories so that they would last? Would you be left scratching pictograms on rock walls? How good is your artistry? Perhaps you would make clay tablets and start painstakingly trying to record information and memories of what was in wet clay, and pass it down as verbal stories – like the Epic of Gilgamesh (also available on tablet) or the Satapatha Brahmana which future generations would not understand and make fairy stories of them.
Shakespeare may have got it right when he had Hamlet say: ” There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy”
Aw shucks! I was hoping for that thing where all the Christians would be zapped up to Heaven and leave all their nice cars, homes and food stores. Stay away from the Mormon places; they never have any booze and there is a limit to how much Jello most people can eat.
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I’ve got 2.5 acres on Whidbey Island. ;) No budget though. :(
The ancient aliens concept has always intrigued me. Even though most of the crap you see on History Channel about it is just that, crap, there’s a kernel of possibility there. And the “sudden civilization” concept could potentially be part of that. There doesn’t seem to be any real evidence, but certain things tend to jump out at you. Like this : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pacal_the_Great_tomb_lid.svg
Interesting post E.M.S. No mention of magnetic pole reversals though. I am fairly new here and unsure whether you have covered this previously, but would love to know if there are any correlations with major events of which you speak. From a brief google there may be connections with increased volcanicity, radiation and other speculative claims.
When I was at college, one guy I knew put in a planning application to build a full-size replica pyramid on Christchurch Meadows. It was refused, but in any case he didn’t have the money to do it. Maybe a bit more ambitious than a henge, but not quite as astronomically useful.
lol :D Thank you for the hilarity, I too would prefer a consciousness raising volcano and meteor shower to a sustainability plantation with “healthcare coverage.” lol :)
ElChiefio says: “Apparently, the transition from pictographs to far more abstract ideaographs did not occur slowly, it occurred quite suddenly.” And “Apparently, the transition from pictographs to far more abstract ideaographs did not occur slowly, it occurred quite suddenly.”
You might be interested in the work of Julian Jaynes. He wrote a book about a rapid shift in conscious experience and the human brain’s organization at some time in the past.
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicameral-Mind/dp/0618057072/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1353805178&sr=8-1&keywords=Julian+Jaynes
One effect that could have caused a global change in brain organization for people all over the planet? One possibility is a rapidly pulsing magnetic field. This is a new form of therapy and I think probably a good one, because it can help to fire up areas of the brain that have gone delta, such as in extreme depression.
So my cards on the table: Mercury passed by earth and there was a cataclysmic electrical exchange which caused powerful oscillations between the two charged bodies. Glad I could help. (:
“All the traits of high civilization appeared there almost simultaneously; the wheel, metallurgy, astrology, astronomy, calendars, taxation, bookkeeping, and an organized priesthood.” was what I intended to quote.
Well what an interesting post and comments.
Many years ago I read a report about the Minoans and the Thera eruption. This was thought to tie into a number of Bible stories, especially the ten plagues of Egypt. In the context of your post today, the writer thought that because the Minoans had an advanced society on an island, they would have had many folks (traders, emissaries, other knowledgeable types) away at the time of the eruption and while the location was lost, the society was not. The survivors might have ended up spread far and wide and been the seeds of many new points of societies. These would have all been started at about the same time.
The timing of the eruption looks wrong for the Mayan Long Count start date. But might there have been a more ancient society that was spread out, or chose to spread itself out over Earth, because of something that happened during that 3114 BCE year?
I found this site interesting, although it doesn’t answer the above question:
http://www.ancient-world-mysteries.com/long-count.html
a global change in brain organization
May I clarify? “Global” in this case means both hemispheres of the brain. Thx.
Climate is caused by natural cycles, as evidence now emerging appears to confirm. (See my website.)
Physics tells us that the adiabatic lapse rate represents that change in temperature that is required to keep the entropy of a parcel of air or water constant when its pressure is changed in an adiabatic and isohaline manner.
Gravity alone determines the change in pressure for a given atmospheric mass. So gravity alone determines the adiabatic lapse rate.
It seems that most climatologists have never learnt this basic fact of physics, so they were bluffed into believing a false conjecture that an imaginary greenhouse effect caused the observed temperature gradient responsible for the surface temperature being higher than the planet’s radiating temperature.
Consideration of what happens on Venus (whose surface receives only about 10% of the insolation received by Earth’s surface) demonstrates that the adiabatic lapse rate can be the only reason for the surface temperature being hundreds of degrees hotter. Thus it also demonstrates the fiction of the GHE conjecture.
Refer Section 8 of this paper for more detail on Venus.
” Yet we know that 12,000 BP there were folks making monumental architecture in Turkey.”
Though this recent discovery is not as old, it is interesting:
Lost city ‘could rewrite history’
Marine scientists say archaeological remains discovered 36 metres (120 feet) underwater in the Gulf of Cambay off the western coast of India could be over 9,000 years old.
The site was discovered by chance last year by oceanographers from India’s National Institute of Ocean Technology conducting a survey of pollution.
The vast city – which is five miles long and two miles wide – is believed to predate the oldest known remains in the subcontinent by more than 5,000 years.
“There’s a huge chronological problem in this discovery,” said Author and film-maker Graham Hancock.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1768109.stm
“Anyone have a few acres, a budget for about 1000 tons of reinforced concrete, and a sense of humor?”
It’s been done Chief! Just up the Columbia river from moi. Completed in 1930 as a WWI memorial.
I reckon one of the scariest (or possibly most entertaining) things I’ve seen about the Big Day is that (allegedly) 1 in 7 people on the internet believe that something’s going to happen. With that many people wandering around expecting “something”, it’s hard to see how “something” won’t happen, albeit probably something -not- involving us evolving into the 4th dimension. Wouldn’t be surprised by just about anything on the earthly plane, though!
E.g. – Remember a few years ago, when the Japanese tried recommending people whose biorhythms were “critical” to drive more safely on those days? Accidents fell. Then somebody stopped to think, and pointed out that, if you have x percent of drivers driving more carefully each day, then of course accidents will fall … biorhythms or no biorhythms.
And btw thanks for your stout defence of Oliver Manuel in the comments under the last of these posts a week ago. I agree, what he says seems to make a lot more sense than his detractors think – I’ve been meaning to get in touch with him sometime just to have a more detailed talk about it, but never yet found the time. Maybe after the Big Day :-) … may also need an industrial grade makeover for my limited mathematical skills, though. Would have commented there, but I had much else to do at the time (mostly, finding out why my main PC had taken to rebooting whenever it felt like it – intermittent power supply weirdness, as it turned out).
Ridicule all you want folks, God said to be fruitful and multipy. What he didn’t say was the second line…..so that we can harvest billions of tons of soylent green in 2012. Mark my words./