The study was originally presented in the Science Magazine (only for subscribers - students from Munich University can access it from our library pc's)

As cannibalism is always worth a headline (the engraving above, used in early newspapers is 500 years old), also NYTimes (free subscription necessary) and Süddeutsche Zeitung (11.4.03, Panorama) are reporting. National Geographic even titles "Cannibalism Normal For Early Humans?". Which is a bit overdrawn, I think, as the whole assumption already seems to be mainly speculation.

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Where's the connection between the ancient culture of the Mayas, the web-language XML and stylesheets? For an answer let's first time-warp back to 1989. Tim Berners Lee 'invented' the WWW and shortly afterwards the markup-language HTML surfaced -- created for the inter-human communication. For this means HTML was an ingeniously simple language by which thoughts easily could be transformed into pictures and given a shape. But soon HTML showed to be insufficient for being handled by machines. Machines don't understand the semantics of pictures, and HTML unifies shape and semantics of a website into one document. Therefore XML was developed which follows the paradigm of structurized documents. Content, structure and shape are separated. XML has the content and an XLS-stylesheet covers the shape of a modern web-document. But alas, this thought of splitting-up a piece of information into content and shape isn't new at all. The Mayas already were knowladgeable of this strategy/technology. On March 21st and September 23rd the shadows cast by the sun reveal a winding serpent at the pyramid of Kukulacan at Chichen Itza -- proof of the aforementioned strategy. The information to be carried, the serpent, represents the XML-document. The sun and the pyramid's architecture constitute a kind of stylesheet, which gives structure and shape to the serpent. Now -- are the Mayas the founding-fathers of the paradigm of structurized documents?

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