ANCIENT ALIENS

Librarian Ernst man uses his extensive knowledge of mathematics to decipher the dots and symbols of a 12th-century Maya text known as the Dresden Codex. In doing so, he unlocks the secrets of the Maya calendar. The Maya have what's widely understood as the most sophisticated ancient calendar ever made. It involves so many different cycles. It's so sophisticated, in fact, that early scholars thought that the Maya were, as they called, esoteric time worshipers. The Maya are very interested in the cycles of life. So a lot of their calendars were created to track those cycles and look for harmonies between cycles to better harmonize themselves with the natural world. ANDREW COLLINS: The long count calendar of the Maya lasted for 5,125 years. It was backdated to have begun in 3114 BC, which meant that it actually ended on December 21, 2012. And many of us will remember how it was believed that there was gonna be a time of great transformation, possibly the end of the world. NARRATOR: In 2012, over a thousand years after the fall of the Maya civilization, their calendar became known to people all around the world. Many believed that the final date on the calendar was intended to mark an apocalyptic event. BARNHART: The idea that the Maya predicted the end of the world was really just a Western misunderstanding of how their calendar works and what they were using their calendar for. Westerners see time as a line, it goes back into the past and forward into the future, and we're the point in the middle. The Maya saw time as a cycle that kept going like the hands of a clock. When it hit 12, it didn't just explode, it just went back around for another loop. So Maya calendar systems were set up to be never-ending cycles. NARRATOR: While the Maya were exceptional at tracking time and observing the heavens, archaeologists were astounded when they discovered that this ancient culture was tracking what is known in astronomy as precession. Precession is the wobbling of the Earth on its axis which changes the location of constellations in the night sky. It's actually a huge cycle that lasts 26,000 years. And the Maya, without a shadow of a doubt, were calculating precession. They were able to say, back in the distant past, this planet would've been in that constellation. NARRATOR: Scholars remain mystified as to how the Maya came to have such an advanced understanding of astronomy, mathematics and timekeeping, and answers have been difficult to come by, since a large portion of the Maya's writing and artifacts have been lost or destroyed over the centuries. There was a big cultural shift between about 900 and 1200 AD, and one of the prevailing theories about the end of Maya civilization was that basically they taxed their resources, that they created an unstable landscape that then lent itself to landslides, to fires, to floods, and that can lead to societal collapse. NARRATOR: In the 16 century, Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Maya cities of the Yucatán Peninsula. They found the sites sparsely populated or even abandoned, with many structures already in ruins. And while Spanish colonizers were the first Europeans to record their accounts of the Maya culture, they were also responsible for destroying much of the Maya's own history. When the Spanish showed up, they wanted to convert them to Christianity. Step one in that process is dividing them from their traditional wisdoms. And those were written in the books. So, the Spanish on purpose burned every document they could find .