An American PhD student accidentally discovered a huge ancient city of thousands of houses in Mexico jungle, the BBC mentioned.
Luke Auld-Thoma found a hidden Mayan city, “Valeriana,” in Mexico’s Campeche that has thousands of untouched structures including pyramids and family houses.
City Was Discovered Accidentally
Luke Auld-Thomas, a researcher at Northern Arizona University, made the remarkable discovery by accident, the BBC noted.
He analyzed publicly available lidar data initially collected for environmental monitoring but came to a surprising end.
The laser scans, originally conducted in 2013 to track forest carbon levels, unveiled around 6,700 Mayan structures over 50 square miles.
Cities Once Had 50,000 People
Auld and Professor Marcello Canuto, both co-authors of the study, found 6,764 buildings of various sizes in three different locations in the jungle.
All the cities may have been home to “30-50,000 people at its peak from 750 to 850 AD,” the research noted.
Auld-Thomas’s findings, published in the journal Antiquity
