william gadoury nz herald
William Gadoury discovered the village using satellite images and Google Maps (Picture: Canadian Space Agency)

A 15-year-old boy has discovered a previously forgotten Mayan city in Central America.

thumbnail for post ID 5872019 Britain’s biggest ever gold nugget found on Welsh beach William Gadoury, from Quebec, believes he’s found the ancient Mayan city using their ancient astronomy with satellite photos.

The teen found that the Mayan cities lined up exactly with the stars in their civilisation’s recognised constellations. From this, he developed a theory that Mayans selected locations for their town and city developments depending on the stars.

According to William, he realised the location of the forgotten city simply by identifying a missing city from a constellation consisting of three stars then matching it up with satellite photos from the Canadian Space Agency.

He then compared the area using Google Earth. Pretty impressive, right?

Satellite images compared with Google Earth show potentially man-made structures beneath the jungle canopy (Canadian Space Agency)
The square outline is believed to be man-made structures beneath vegetation (Picture: Canadian Space Agency)

Gadoury will present his findings at Brazil’s International Science Fair.

Mayans

The Maya are probably the best-known of the classical civilizations of Mesoamerica.

It’s believed they originated in Yucatan around 2600 B.C. and later rose to prominence around A.D. 250 in (present-day) southern Mexico, Guatemala, western Honduras and El Salvador.

Which could be a major contributing factor to why the city has remained lost for so long.

But scans of the area via satellite have revealed linear features distinctive enough to suggest it’s a manmade structure.

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