When we think about the most famous scientists of all time, the names start to peter out once we get to Galileo, who was born in 1564. But Galileo didn’t invent science. Cultures around the world had their own versions of scientists centuries earlier who observed nature, tracked the stars, and puzzled over mathematical mysteries. Now, according to research published in Antiquity, archaeologists have uncovered the name of one of them: Sak Tahn Waax, a Maya mathematician-astronomer who may be the earliest known scientist ever identified in the Americas.
The discovery comes from the ancient Maya city of Xultun in what we now know as Guatemala, where researchers found a wall that was the ancient Maya equivalent of the modern-day dry-erase board, as it was covered in mathematical calculations and astronomical tables, evidence that Sak Tahn Waax (which means “White-Chested Fox”) was trying to use math and reason to make sense of a vast universe, thus making him the first known Maya scientist whose name has successfully echoed through the ages.
The Earliest Known Scientist in the Americas May Have Been a Maya Astronomer
The Maya were a sprawling civilization so advanced and so widely spread across Central America and the southern tip of Mexico that researchers are still finding huge Maya cities buried deep within Mexican jungles. And there are likely plenty more out there waiting to be discovered. We’ve long known the Maya had a firm grasp of many scientific disciplines, what with their accurate calendars and spot-on astronomical observations, but we never had a single person’s name to attribute it to. Now we do, and he was likely just one of many over the 3,500 years that the Maya civilization spanned before it fell to the Spanish colonizers in the late 1600s.
The researchers uncovered a mathematical formula that Sak Tahn Waax was fiddling with, connecting multiple cycles of time, including the solar year, the sacred 260-day calendar, and Venus’s orbit. The researchers describe the work as “playful,” which I interpret to mean that Sak Tahn Waax was really in the zone, connecting all sorts of dots in an attempt to forge a grand theory as he sought to understand how different celestial cycles fit together.
It’s high-level stuff for a high-level ancient civilization.
It’s easy to just think of science as a modern invention that began in Europe. Findings like this suggest that long before there were the Galileos of the world peering into the night sky, there were dozens, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands, of Sak Tahn Waax-types who were laying the groundwork.
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