New Mayan calendar: World not ending in 2012

Proof the world will not end in 2012.

Good news for those looking forward to Christmas, the world’s not ending in December 2012!

Archaeologists not working for some lame cable TV program have discovered a new, but really old Mayan calendar that extends our purchasing power into George Jetson territory.

The Mayans, best known for crackpot misinterpretations of their Mesoamerican scribblings, were obsessed with time, and some had theorized the ancient culture, which had not predicted Spaniards, had somehow predicted The End of Time.

Not so, says someone really smart about this sort of thing.

“The Mayan calendar is going to keep going for billions, trillions, octillions of years into the future,” said archaeologist David Stuart of the University of Texas, who worked to decipher glyphs found in 2010 in the ancient Maya city of Xultun in northeast Guatemala.

The calendar, the oldest Mayan one ever discovered, features stacked bars and dots that count lunar cycles.  It was likely drawn up in the 800s, about the time Pope Leo III (who used the more accurate Julian calendar) crowned Charlemagne Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

The original article on the discovery appears in Science magazine. LiveScience.com has a good writeup online.