The oldest-known version of the ancient Maya calendar has been discovered adorning a lavishly painted wall in the ruins of a city deep in the Guatemalan rainforest.
The hieroglyphs, painted in black and red, along with a colorful mural of a king and his mysterious attendants, seem to have been a sort of handy reference chart for court scribes in A.D. 800 — the astronomers and mathematicians of their day. Contrary to popular myth, this calendar isn't a countdown to the end of the world in December 2012, the study researchers said.
So go ahead and firm up that end of December stuff you only penciled in on your calendar, just in case.
But hey, don't be disappointed. If you really like naked mountain climbing in France, you've got many years ahead of you to do so.
But have some sympathy for the people of Bugarach, France, when it dawns on them that all those hippies showing up didn't bother to buy round-trip tickets and have no place to go.
