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CBS News Wrote:Boy wonder may have discovered lost Mayan city

The archaeological community may be on the cusp of discovering a long lost Mayan city -- all thanks to a 15-year-old boy in Canada who took a hunch and ran with it.

The story starts two years ago, when William Gadoury, who attends a private school in Joliette, Quebec, was invited to present at a scientific conference after winning a few science fairs. At the conference, he happened to be assigned the booth next to the Canadian Space Agency, Canada's equivalent of NASA.

A project officer at the Canadian Space Agency, Daniel De Lisle, was intrigued by his pint-sized neighbor.

"You could see the boy was very bright and knew what he was talking about. He had his binders prepared with questions and answers both in French and English," De Lisle said.

Impressed, De Lisle invited Gadoury to a lunch conference with his team at the Canadian Space Agency.

"I told my colleagues, 'This could be our next president at CSA. One day we may all have to work for him,'" Des Lisle said.

Gadoury accepted Des Lisle's invitiation, but went a step farther. A passionate student of ancient civilizations in Central America, he came to CSA armed with a question: What if there was an unseen correlation between star constellations and the locations of ancient Mayan cities, given all the evidence that the Mayans closely studied and worshipped the stars? His theory could explain why so many Mayan cities have been discovered in awkward, arid locations. Maybe they were plotted in alignment with the stars, he explained.

"He thought, 'Maybe there was another reason they had these temples there,'" De Lisle told CBS News. "He made the link."

Intrigued, De Lisle provided Gadoury with high resolution satellite images -- culled from NASA and the Japanese Space Agency -- to analyze. The teen then superimposed those satellite images over Google Maps and Google Earth images to look for patterns.

One by one, he went through 22 different star constellations and found that they all matched the locations of 117 known ancient Mayan cities, from Mexico to Guatemala to Honduras to El Salvador. But when he looked at a 23rd constellation, he noticed that one of its stars was unmatched to any known city. Gadoury figured that location -- in the middle of the remote jungle of the Yucatan Peninsula -- could be the site of an unknown city.

Narrowing in on specific satellite images of this site, Gadoury and De Lisle were stunned by what they saw. Under the jungle's thick layer of vegetation, they saw signs of a large, linear structure that could be an ancient Mayan pyramid. Surrounding the pyramid, they also saw signs of dozens of smaller structures, alleys and streets -- in short, what could be an ancient city never before identified.


Satellite images might reveal an ancient Mayan city buried under the jungle in a remote part of the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico.
Canadian Space Agency

"You could see the spark in his eye. He was very proud. He said, 'This is what I came up with and I'm pretty sure there's something there,'" De Lisle said.

If the photographs can be verified, the new city would be one of the five largest Mayan cities ever discovered, according to the newspaper Le Journal de Montreal.

Gadoury hopes to name the new city K'aak Chi, which means "Fire Mouth," and take part in archaeologists' eventual excavation of the site.

"It would be the culmination of my three years of work and the dream of my life," he told the Journal.

Now that the discovery is public, Gadoury's life is significantly changed. This week, in addition to juggling school exams, he's doing interviews with media outlets around the world, preparing to publish his research in a French-language scientific journal, and gearing up to attend a national archaeology conference in Brazil this fall. Plus, several archaeologists have shown interest in taking him on excavations of the Yucatan Peninsula site, De Lisle said.

"It's quite impressive. The depth of his research -- from the stars to the satellite imagery to the foliage to the remains -- is incredible," De Lisle said.

As for De Lisle, he plans to step back and let his 15-year-old compatriot "fly on his own." Once his interview requests die down, De Lisle will return to his day job, where he's part of a team preparing to launch three satellites by 2018 to document the whole breadth of Canada. The government will use those images to do everything from taking crop inventory to monitoring icebergs to tracking illegal fishing and boating.

"We'll give him our blessings," he said, laughing. "This project with William is very far from my daily job."

Source: CBS News, May 10, 2016

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Can verify, can also verify that they should not go there at this time.

I read about that yesterday, very cool.

The boy is impressive sure but HOW did the Mayans so accurately place their cities. How was the mapping so far advanced that they accomplished this without the use of satalites gps, or modern navigation. Wow!!

They were probably way better than we are today at doing it because they didn't need gps. It's easy to think our present society as modern and advanced but it's often far from the truth. As individuals we are way less skilled at many many many things than people used to be centuries ago. The thing is technology is convenient but it does the job for us instead of helping us do the job. There are lots of articles about archaeological discoveries that seems to indicate there were really advanced civilisation way before our modern history is willing to accept. I've read somewhere that there are many spiritual or ritual sites on earth that are all alligned together in a logical way. How did they build those over thousands of years without gps? We may not be as advanced as one may think at first.

Egypt did the exact same thing when placing their pyramids to the constellation of Orion, so this is not a surprise. Both were ruled by the Annunaki, or as Ra called them, the "Anak."