Claims that a young teen named William Gadoury from Canada discovered a Mayan civilization simply by using Google Earth are spreading across the Internet, attracting plenty of attention.
What’s true: William Gadoury is a real person and did believe he may have found two Mayan structures in Mexico using various avenues of Internet research.
What’s false: That what he found is actually a Mayan structure, since his discovery has been rebuked by most experts in the field. Also the claim that Gadoury stumbled on the structure using Google Earth is also misleading. Gadoury actually employed a photo-taking satellite from the Canadian Space Agency. Google Earth played only a minor role in the “discovery”.
According to reports, William Gadoury, a 15 year old from Quebec had become fascinated with Mayan culture thanks to their 2012 “doomsday” predictions that gained so much media attention a number of years ago (in reality it was just the natural end of the Mayan calendar, not a prediction to the end of the Earth.)
In his quest to discover lost Mayan structures, Gadoury hypothesized that the Mayan’s built their cities around the constellations in the sky. However one constellation – according to Gadoury – seemed to be missing any settlement back here on planet Earth. Gadoury used Google Earth to discover the area corresponding to the constellation was a jungle deep inside Mexico.
After sending a proposal to the Canadian Space Agency, Gadoury got his hands on more detailed satellite imagery of the area and there he discovered two man-made structures, which he predicted to be Mayan in nature.
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His work got plenty of attention, but alas most experts in the field – while crediting Gadoury for his enthusiasm – have discredited his work.
Thomas Garrison, an anthropologist at the University of Southern California, told Gizmodo that the structures were most likely fields, or to be more precise, a milpa, which is a crop growing system used in those areas of Mexico. Garrison predicted that the milpa had been fallow for around 10-15 years.
Garrison told Gizmodo –
I’d guess it’s been fallow for 10-15 years. This is obvious to anyone that has spent any time at all in the Maya lowlands. I hope that this young scholar will consider his pursuits at the university level so that his next discovery—and there are plenty to be made—will be a meaningful one.
Many other experts agreed with this conclusion. Dr. Robert Rosenswig is an associate professor at the University of Albany said…
The images highlight lower areas in vegetation. The square structures are open fields that have been left fallow.
Other’s also dismissed the claims that the Mayan’s would have settled in accordance to the constellations, even pointing out that we only know a small number of Mayan constellations that would likely differ from the star patterns we recognise today.
However, despite these debunking, many media outlets and blogs reported on the story, because after all, a teenager finding a Mayan structure using Google Earth is a pretty decent headline.