![]() His insight laid the foundation for understanding this transient point of light for what it truly is: a visitor from the darkness of vast distances and time. It took another 40,000-plus years for civilization to put a telescope in the hands of Galileo, who used it, a mere 413 years ago, to prove that the Earth is round and that the sun, moon and stars do not revolve around it. It's possible that they, along with our modern human ancestors, paused from their hunting and gathering to wonder why this smudge of light appeared seemingly out of nowhere and then mysteriously disappeared a few weeks later. The last time this comet visited our cosmic neighborhood, Neanderthals, our low-browed human cousins, still walked the Earth. "We're so interested in these objects because we know things like this particular comet have to be very old, extremely old." "Those little pieces, which could be the size of mountains, become the comets that we know today," says Amy Mainzer, an astronomer at the University of Arizona. At the extreme outer edge, where the sun's gravity is weak, bits of this primordial material were left behind, like crumbs. The Oort Cloud dates back 4 billion years, when a cloud of gas and dust collapsed upon itself to form the sun and the planets. This region, known as the Oort Cloud, may extend halfway to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri-the distance light travels in two years, more than 10 trillion miles. "Rather than asking why Teotihuacan collapsed, it is more interesting to ask why it lasted so long," he says.Photo-illustration by Newsweek Source images by Preserved Light Photography/Getty It's unclear why Teotihuacan collapsed one theory is that poorer classes carried out an internal uprising against the elite.įor Cowgill, who says more studies are needed to understand the lives of the poorer classes that inhabited Teotihuacan, the mystery lies not as much in who built the city or in why it fell. Since 2003, archaeologist Sergio Gomez has been working to access new parts of the complex, and has only recently reached the end of a tunnel that could hold a king's tomb. Inside the temple, researchers found buried animals and bodies, with heads that had been lobbed off, all thought to be offerings to gods or sanctification for successive layers of the pyramid as it was built. It was there, beneath layers of dirt and stone, that researchers realized the awe-inspiring craftsmanship of Teotihuacan's architects was matched by a cultural penchant for brutality and human and animal sacrifice. The main excavations, performed by Professors Saburo Sugiyama of Aichi Prefectural University in Japan and Rubén Cabrera, a Mexican archaeologist, have been at the Pyramid of the Moon. One theory says an erupting volcano forced a wave of immigrants into the Teotihuacan valley and that those refugees either built or bolstered the city. No matter its principal builders, evidence shows that Teotihuacan hosted a patchwork of cultures including the Maya, Mixtec, and Zapotec. Some scholars say the Totonac culture was responsible. Others note that the Toltec peaked far later than Teotihuacan's zenith, undermining that theory. Scholars once pointed to the Toltec culture. ![]() ![]() But only some portions have been excavated. Who Built It?Ĭowgill says the site's visible surface remains have all been mapped in detail. Oddly, Teotihuacan, which contains a massive central road (the Street of the Dead) and buildings including the Temple of the Sun and the Temple of the Moon, has no military structures-though experts say the military and cultural wake of Teotihuacan was heavily felt throughout the region. comparable to the largest pyramids of Egypt." "It had thousands of residential compounds and scores of pyramid-temples. "It was the largest city anywhere in the Western Hemisphere before the 1400s," Cowgill says. It covered 8 square miles (21 square kilometers) and supported a population of a hundred thousand, according to George Cowgill, an archaeologist at Arizona State University and a National Geographic Society grantee. But it was the Aztec, descending on the abandoned site, no doubt falling awestruck by what they saw, who gave its current name: Teotihuacan.Ī famed archaeological site located fewer than 30 miles (50 kilometers) from Mexico City, Teotihuacan reached its zenith between 100 B.C. It was built by hand more than a thousand years before the swooping arrival of the Nahuatl-speaking Aztec in central Mexico. It was massive, one of the first great cities of the Western Hemisphere.
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