The ancient Maya loved using a bright red paint to decorate all sorts of things, from temple walls to pottery. Thousands of years after their civilization collapsed, we’re finding that their favorite shade of red contained mercury that poisoned their water and food supply.
According to a recent study published in Science Advances by Auburn University paleolimnologist Matthew Waters, it’s an environmental catastrophe of their own making. The Maya loved the color red. It held several sacred meanings, from representing blood to the Sun, among others.
To get that vibrant hue, they relied heavily on cinnabar, a bright red mineral that is highly toxic because it contains mercury sulfide. The funny thing is, Cinnabar does not naturally occur in the Yucatán Peninsula, where the Maya resided. They used a complex trade network to import the stuff that was poisoning them.
The Ancient Maya May Have Been Poisoning Themselves With Something They Considered Sacred
Over the centuries, rain washed paint runoff directly into water sources essential to the community, like Lago Coba and Cenote Xcach. When the mercury hit the lake bottom, bacteria transformed the runoff into lethal methylmercury.
When modern researchers pulled sediment cores from those lakes, they found mercury levels up to six times higher than today’s highest safety thresholds. All that mercury nuked the local aquatic ecosystem, killing the algae and freshwater shellfish the Maya relied on for protein.
Historians have debated for years whether climate change or war caused the Maya collapse during the Classic Period. Seems like we could also add in the casual drinking of toxic heavy metals.
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