Re: Leap Years, 2012 & The Mayan Calendar

Hello, Internet. A lot of you sent me this image making the rounds which concerns the Mayan prediction that the world will end on December 21, 2012. The claim is that the Mayan calendar short counted the years because they forgot about leap days, so the world should have already ended. This is followed by "Mind = Blown," which I'm not sure how to take. Do people think that the world forgot to have its apocalypse or that were it not for leap days that we'd already be living in the future?

Either way, it's spawned many an argument that people ask me to explain, which I'm happy to do, because my next big video was delayed by pestilence, which struck me down into the depths of unproductive misery for the last few weeks. So, if you haven't already, please watch the related videos now; otherwise, this won't make a whole lot of sense, and there are a few corrections I'd like to make.

The first of these is that I shouldn't have called the Mayans "Mayans." Maya is the correct singular and plural noun to use in the same way that sheep is both singular and plural. Mayan is the name of the language and the adjective form of the word, as in the Mayan civilization. Secondly, I showed a picture of the Aztec calendar stone, rather than a Mayan calendar, in my 2012 video, which at the time I thought was okay because the Aztec calendar is the same as the Mayan—just with different names, sort of like the Greek and Roman gods.

And, frankly, the Aztec one is much cooler looking. But I was still wrong to show it because, despite naming it the Aztec calendar stone, archeologists don't actually think it's a calendar. And, speaking of stone, I used the term Stone Age to describe the Maya, which made many people very angry. For clarity, Stone Age does not mean stupid; it's the technological classification of a civilization limited to stone tools.

Advanced though their astronomy and mathematics were, the Maya never discovered metallurgy and thus couldn't move on to the Bronze Age, then the Iron Age, then the Diamond Age. Right. Enough corrections. It's explanation time for this image which raised three questions: 1) Does the Mayan calendar have leap days? 2) Did the Maya miscount the years? 3) Should the world have already ended?

The answer to all of these is no. To briefly recap, leap years exist to stop seasons from drifting out of sync with the calendar; a problem that vexed Pope Gregory because every year Easter and spring were getting further apart. To fix this, he introduced the modestly named Gregorian calendar, with its fancy leap year rules to keep the seasons and thus the holidays together.

But, while Pope Gregory cared about the seasons, the ancient Maya did not. Presumably because where they lived, the weather comes in only one season: too hot and too humid. So the Mayan calendar ignores seasons in favor of accurately tracking the days since the creation of the Mayan religion. This renders leap years an unnecessary complication.

Though the Mayan calendar is no stranger to complication, with its cycles within cycles within cycles within cycles within cycles that, if you're interested, Hank Green can tell you much more about. But back to the miscounting claims, which comes from our idea that leap days are extra days, which, of course, they really aren't.

The Gregorian calendar doesn't give people extra days any more than daylight saving time gives people extra sunlight. If you transported Pope Gregory 1,000 years back in time to meet the Mayan Lady Xoc and then made them count the days until this year's winter solstice, they'd agree on that number because they're just counting sunrises.

It's not like Pope Gregory with his clever modern calendar would notice 500+ days that the Lady Xoc somehow missed, perhaps while distracted by the pain from her thorns-through-the-tongue routine. The only thing that they would disagree on is what to call that day, with Pope Gregory insisting on December 21, 2012, and Lady Xoc preferring the 13th Baktun.

So, this image is wrong because it's an apples-to-oranges comparison. The Mayan calendar doesn't have leap days because it doesn't need them. It counts days just fine, and its long cycle will finish on December 21, 2012, but the world will still go on.