Pok-A-Tok: The Sacred Ball Game of the Ancient Maya - National Ancient Maya

http://www.omec-arkofthecovenantmystery.com/olmec/stone-grinders-of-ancient-origin/
Pok-A-Tok: The Sacred Ball Game of the Ancient Maya - National Ancient Maya
According to historians, the Olmec civilization predated the Aztecs and the Mayans. The Olmec that has come to Chicago is not an actual, living member of this civilization, but an Olmec head sculpture. This sculpture is at the northeast corner of Chicago's Field Museum. (The Field Museum is at 1400 S. Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, Ill.)

If you study the Mayans and their philosophy, you will find that their social, economic and spiritual systems were built on cycles. Cycles go around, the end of one cycle is always the beginning of another. December 21, 2012 is the end of a 5125 year cycle called the Long Count Calendar. The Mayans measured long time periods by means of a Long Count, in which one 360-day year (a "Tun"), consists of 18 x 20-day "months" ("Uinals"). Twenty of these Tuns is a Katun; 20 Katuns is a Baktun (nearly 400 years); and 13 Baktuns adds up to a "Great Cycle" of 1,872,000 days, ( 5200 Tuns, or about 5125 years).

The Olmec sculptures are also exceptionally well preserved and provide a vibrant portrayal of the creativity of this ancient civilization and its fascinating traditions. Several sculptures portray panthers, described as the mythological ancestors of the Olmec people in the animal kingdom. This is just one of several examples of the “supernatural” world of legends and the cosmology of the nighttime sky which provided the subject matter for many Olmec sculptures.

The Olmecs of Central America used the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar and it required the digit zero as a placeholder and for that reason, the people could have long before the Maya people, used zero actively. However, a lot is in the dark concerning the Olmecs whose civilization was over by the 4th Century BC. Their Long Count Dates have been discovered in their homeland and that is the basis that's used to assume the likelihood that they could have been the true inventors of zero in the world. India in the 4th Century BC was identified to have used blanks to characterize the digit zero.

I'll start with a revelation. There is growing evidence that there were black, red, yellow and white men, with diverse backgrounds and a multitude of talents traveling in those boats. They were all together for a common cause, possibly, and very likely for their very lives. There were men with beards on those boats, probably the first ever seen on this continent. A collection of professional types, like warriors with tools of war, athletes, architects with detailed memories, authoritarian priest leaders, stargazing observers, creative artisans, earth scientists, scribes, and herbal medicine men. They also carried with them a very precious cargo, their families.