With Mercator Maps and stories that colonized countries were all illiterate savages with no souls, Europeans demonstrated that reality often gave way to their geopolitics.(1) That meant conquered lands were often marginalized.
Many were just as violent as claimed - the period before Europeans arrived in North America was far more violent than after, the natives murdered and colonized each other so fiercely that tribes were down to dozens by 1776 - and in the upper areas they never developed reading or writing so history is just what they claimed and Europeans logged, but in South America it was a different story.
The Mayans, for example, did quality math. They had calendars so precise they set off doomsday prophecies among people who really should have known better than to believe the world was ending on December 21, 2012. That doesn't mean we know their names the way we know Greeks, Persians, or what would not be called Chinese.
Thanks to ancient plaster found in an abandoned villa in Xultun (Guatemala) and a mathematical formula for the periods of celestial bodies it contained, we know a name: Sak Tahn Waax, which the authors of a new paper in Antiquity translated as “White-Chested Fox.”
There are our pre-colonial Maya ‘codex’ books (Dresden, etc.) but those were all made centuries after this work. Sak Tahn Waax may be the earliest Mayan mathematical genius in history.
Citation: Rossi FD, Stuart D, Hurst H. The identification and work of an eighth-century Maya mathematician. Antiquity. Published online 2026:1-16. doi:10.15184/aqy.2026.10378
NOTE:
(1) If Europeans did to the face what they did to early understanding of geography...
Credit: Xeselaro
