3 ms·
Olmecs and Mayans. They did all kinds of things with nothing, like just nothing. They tried to publish their works but the a Spanish bishop burned every codex
by daniel-cussen 5y ago
Olmecs and Mayans. They did all kinds of things with nothing, like just nothing. They tried to publish their works but the a Spanish bishop burned every codex. He tracked every codex down, too, presumably by interrogations. Four survived.
We're currently in the Mayan Dark Ages in that sense, there's stuff they had we still can't do. They were a millennium ahead of Eurasian math, finding zero in 200BC versus 800AD.
- jacobr1 5y ago> there's stuff they had we still can't do I'm skeptical, how would we know that? Are there vague inscriptions of things like Fermat's margin notes that imply missing knowledge?
- labster 5y agoWe still don’t have vertical basketball hoops. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Ballgame https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Ballgame
- daniel-cussen 5y agoThose were the real ballers of the new world. That would have made great television!
- daniel-cussen 5y agoNo, it's not that. So a lot of mathematical research is serial, so an extra millennium has worth that multitudes of mathematicians (in the last 150 years, for instance) lack. It's also very hierarchical, and Maya were the civilization that most put emphasis on mathematics. Although yes, there's practically nothing left, the length of year figure they had, very little else.