The sad thing is that for all their advanced ways of the time, they succumbed to the same thing we are experiencing now... being too comfortable to fix what's broken.

The Mayans did not want to give up their lifestyles even in the face of crippling population growth and surrounding natural resource depletion... which led to their downfall.

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sethammons 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

This should be upvoted. A lot. The downvotes are ill-informed.

https://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/77060/mayan-def...

From newish imaging. We can see the impressions of vast jungle swaths cut down and way made for planting food and houses. This looks to have disrupted the water cycle enough to cause cinotes (underground water systems and only source of drinking water) to deplete. We see sacrificial remnants below the modern water line. Their water disappeared and so did their civilization. By the time the Spanish arrived, the local people had no knowledge of how to build nor maintain their now ancient cities, the jungles regrew, water came back, and sacrificial artifacts were covered by replenished water levels.

They are an example of man made effects on local weather leading to the downfall of an advanced civilization.

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bbarnett 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Didn't the Spanish show up briefly, then come back in force later?

I've heard some speculate that this introduced European diseases, and unlike many Native American tribes, the Mayans lived in dense cities. Such disease would spread like wildfire.

(Certainly, some disease made it the other way too! Tuberculosis and syphilis are examples)

I've heard numbers like 95% died, and it was decades between first contact and serious conquest.

That leaves a lot of time for people to grow up with no one to teach them trades, or even how to read.

If we lost 95% of our population, so many active skills would be lost.

	▲	antognini 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The collapse of classical Maya civilization predated the arrival of the Spanish by around six centuries.
	▲	returningfory2 3 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> Didn't the Spanish show up briefly, then come back in force later? The end of the Incan empire is a really striking example of this dynamic. The Spanish landed on the South American mainland in ~1524, European diseases started spreading, and in 1527 the Incan emperor died from one of the diseases without an heir. This triggered a really brutal civil war of succession that weakened the empire. The Spanish started the conquest proper of the Incan empire in ~1532 and were successful in part because how weak the empire was after the civil war. So essentially, by arriving early and (inadvertently) initiating the disease epidemics, the Spanish put in place conditions that made the conquest possible a few years later.
	▲	WalterBright 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Estimates vary wildly on what percentage of the natives died from european diseases. There's just too little information on pre-Columbian populations. For comparison, estimates of the deaths from the Black Plague in Europe are 30% to 60%. It's a huge error bar, despite having a lot of written records that survived.

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loloquwowndueo 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

*cenotes

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t1E9mE7JTRjf 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Sounds like the opposite no? Since we are going through population collapse in a time of abundance. Does make me wonder what the political dynamics were at the time, whether some could see problems but weren't in power to change things. Or maybe they couldn't understand or figure out solutions to the problems. What I'd give to be a multilingual fly on the wall throughout history.

	▲	asacrowflies 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		We don't really have abundance tho.... We have massive over consumption that feels like abundance. Like a gambler