Thanks for the excellent information Mark. As I’m sure you’re aware, this was reported widely in the media as new and important information. I’m not sure wo the sources for that information may have been. Do you have any idea why anyone would have portrayed this discovery to the media in that light?

And the tables written on the wall therein (although *very* interesting to historians of science), give NO new information about how far into the future the Maya predicted. We’ve known for decades that at Palenque, scribes predicted an anniversary celebration in the year 4772 AD. The same astronomical tables appear in the Dresden Codex, written about 500 years later. The more head-scratching of the Xultun numbers, the multiples-of-magic-numbers tables, are simply lengths of time, without any anchor to beginnings or ends. They do NOT specifically reach 7000 years into the future. It’s like they discovered a set of numbers saying: “April 15th: 5,128 years and 32 days.” Doesn’t say from (or to) WHICH April 15th they are talking about. There’s no verb at all. Does THAT tell you “The calendar goes on beyond 2012?”

Yes. Suspicious it is.

Yes, but you can always fall back on the ever-popular zombie apocalypse. Or even scarier, the Rush Limbaugh evangelical moral crusader apocalypse.