According to the ABC News of October 20, a recent research has showed that the mythological date of the "end of days" may be off by 50 to 100 years。
To convert the ancient Mayan calendar to the Gregorian (or modern) calendar, scholars use a numerical value (called the GMT). But Gerardo Aldana, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says the data supporting the widely-adopted conversion factor may be invalid。
In a chapter in the book "Calendars and Years II: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World," Aldana casts doubt on the accuracy of the Mayan calendar correlation, saying that the 2012 prophecy as well as other dates may be off。
The GMT constant, named for early Mayan scholars Joseph Goodman, Juan Martinez-Hernandez and J. Eric S. Thompson, is partly based on astronomical events. Those early Mayanists relied heavily on dates found in colonial documents written in Mayan languages and recorded in the Latin alphabet。
A later scholar, American linguist and anthropologist Floyd Lounsbury, further supported the GMT constant。
However, Aldana found weaknesses in Lounsbury's work that cause the argument behind the GMT constant to fall "like a stack of cards."
"This may not seem to be much, but what it does is destabilize the entire argument," Aldana said, "A few scholars have stood up and said, ‘No, the GMT is wrong.' But in my opinion, what they've done is try to provide alternatives without looking at why the GMT is wrong in the first place."