Pride male said:
^I dont think the Mayans and Incas built that stuff. Why dont Mexicans built stuff anymore, what happened? How can cannibals understna astronomy and so forth? If you watch Inca tours with Brien Foerster, he explains why the Inca were not responsible for that civilisation.
Because melonheads built them.
Regarding the Maya, their fall was "multi-varied" and is still not understood. Following studies carried out in the 1980s, the prevailing hypothesis seized upon by environmentalists was that the Maya practiced too much deforestation, thereby causing the land to warm up, which caused less rain (exacerbating a severe drought they were already in), and even causing landslides. However, research carried out at Copan on pollen levels shows that forest density there increased during the Late Classical Period (600-900 AD).
Maya society was extremely stratified; its writing system was so hard to read that only the ruling class could do so, and only artists could actually write/draw it. Only the ruling class understood astronomy and serious architecture too. Unlike Eric Thompson's theory (colored by his own bias) of the Maya as peaceful astronomers, they were warlike and their city-states had both allies and enemies, with regicide being common. Wall paintings in Yaxchilan and others bear witness to this. Any sort of peasant unrest and revolt, resulting in the death of the ruling class, would mean a collapse of classical Southern Lowland Maya civilization. The peasantry was simply too uneducated to continue even a semblance of the civilization without the elite class.
There is no accepted theory for the decline, and it wasn't a complete disappearance overnight, hence the movement of power from the lowlands to northern Yucatan and the flourishing civilization there at such centers as Chichen Itza, Uxmal, Tulum, etc. However, it was a different civilization which seems to have been either intermarried or invaded by the Toltecs of Central Mexico, one which held on until the arrival of the Spanish.
If we're to discredit theories of Atlanteans or aliens, I would say that unrest, caused by food shortages, lead to massive revolts in the Southern Lowland Maya civilization, resulting in the death of the ruling class. All the rituals and sacrifices would have done nothing in the face of drought, which would have led to dying populations, unrest, and finally, bloody coups.
For evidence of this, look no further than at the millions of modern Maya living in southern Mexico and Guatemala who carry Maya DNA, some of it unmixed, but none of the intelligence of their fore bearers. It would be analogous to bus drivers and strippers killing off all smart people and trying to take over a country. Not too different from what you see in Venezuela at the moment.
