No one can say for sure know what happened to the Mayan people and their civilization, but there are many theories that are out there that were researched by scientist and theologians. The first theory, which was researched by Jared Diamond an American evolutionary biologist, would be that the cities of the Mayans got over populated and the natural resources may have been stretched to the breaking point. The second theory was due to the climate, the drought and the rainfall. Penn State anthropologist Dr. Douglas Kennett stated that, researchers have concluded that the climate change overturned the long-term wet weather pattern in Yucatan Peninsula and Central America to severe famine (T, Internationl Busniess, 2012). Many researchers thought that the drought and the lack of rainfall were what wiped out the Mayan Civilization. David Hodell a geologist from the University of Florida feels that the impacting drought could have been due to the changing position of the sun, as finding from the lake the team selected for their study (T, Internationl Busniess, 2012). Between 660 and 100CE, the climate change shared dying trend with less rainfall and long droughts. Numerous studies have shown that there were many prolonged droughts around the time of the civilizations decline. Gerald Haug, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, found it worse than that. He did a year by year reconstruction of the lake sediments and it showed that the rainfall was abundant from 550 to 750, but over the next century there were many periods of severe drought, lasting for years at a time (Marshall, 2012). Due to the lack of rainfall there was not sufficient amount of water to help keep the cities from dying out. Water was the major key to the Mayans survival, water was very much needed for the pack animals. Pack animals were the muscle, they were needed to heave and push when humans could not, the animals were also needed to help with the farming and building of the temples, but do to the lack of the rain the animals died and there was little help in the fields.
The cities were over populated due to the lack of resources. The lack of resources ties into the theory of the lack of rain. Political elites failed to resolve the escalating economic problems and the system collapsed, it was too late when the leaders finally recognized the problem. Do to the movement from one city to the next the people became malnourished and with being malnourished they blamed the government. With the movement from city to city the population started to vanish, the population went from millions to tens of thousands. The birth rates dropped drastically. Some scholars think that the invasion of disease or shifting of trade routes were the cause of the decline of the population. “The carrying capacity of the ecosystem was pushed to its limits,” says Marcello Canuto anthropology professor of Yale (Carroll, 2013).
There are several theories of why the Mayan civilization died, but the theories that I thought were important were because of the drought and lack of rainfall, which seem the most prevalent reason why the civilization does not exist to this day or not as much. The second reason was that the cities were over populated. The cities were probably over populated because of the lack of rain and the drought. There were too many people in one location, because they migrated where there were natural resources were and where they could survive. The lack of rain and the droughts added to both of my theories of why the Mayan civilization did not survive back then.