An ancient Maya settlement, lost to the forest for centuries, was unexpectedly discovered by a Ph.D. student who fell down an internet rabbit hole.

Tulane University Ph.D. candidate Luke Auld-Thomas was more than a dozen pages into Google search results when he came across a laser survey conducted in Mexico by CartoData for environmental monitoring purposes.

Published in the journal Antiquity, Auld-Thomas and his colleagues reported the discovery of an ancient Maya site hidden within neglected LiDAR data, buried at the bottom of a Google search query.

LIDAR Discovery

While advances in remote sensing technology have transformed archaeology over the last two decades, Maya archaeology is often imagined as the result of laborious expeditions through dense jungle terrain in search of long-lost ruins. Instead, Auld-Thomas made a major discovery from the comfort of home.

LiDAR creates a 3D map by firing laser pulses at a landscape from above using drones, aircraft, or other aerial platforms. In this case, the original survey data showed only a dense forest canopy, making the site indistinguishable from the surrounding terrain. However, once that upper layer was digitally removed, a sophisticated settlement came into view.

Located in Mexico’s southeastern state of Campeche, the lost city contains plazas, causeways, ball courts, and pyramids that had remained unseen for centuries. Although the LiDAR operators were focused on environmental monitoring and did not investigate the data at this level, Auld-Thomas and a colleague recognized the archaeological significance of what they were seeing and identified the site, naming it Valeriana.

Valeriana 

During their classic period, between 250 and 900 AD, the Maya developed the rugged Campeche landscape into complex urban environments.

The city of Valeriana, which the team found in the data, turned out to be the second-largest Maya site in North America, eclipsing Calakmul, some 100 kilometers distant. According to the researchers’ estimate, 30,000 to 50,000 people resided in the city between 750 and 850 AD, and it possibly served as a regional capital.

The site’s tropical setting has been a subject of debate among archaeologists, who question whether the population density of typical tropical settlements is skewed by the overrepresentation of large, dense settlements in the data. The team’s discovery of a dense and sophisticated urban environment comprised of nearly 7,000 buildings suggests that such dense sites are not unusual.

While the site contains many features typical of Maya cities, one unusual element particularly intrigued the researchers, consisting a sinkhole leading to a partially collapsed cave system, surrounded by a narrow quatrefoil-shaped ditch—a form frequently used in Mesoamerican art to symbolize caves and sinkholes.

Because the feature lacks substantial embankments and is relatively small in scale, the team does not believe it served a defensive purpose. However, its unusual design may warrant further investigation.

LiDAR Discoveries

Remote-sensing technologies such as LiDAR have transformed archaeology in recent decades, allowing researchers to identify hidden sites across vast and inaccessible landscapes without setting foot on the ground.

In 2013, LiDAR surveys revealed extensive urban networks surrounding Cambodia’s Angkor region, once the heart of the Khmer Empire. Researchers later used the technology to digitally strip away the Guatemalan rainforest canopy, uncovering more than 60,000 previously unknown structures. Using traditional survey methods, discoveries on that scale would likely have taken generations to achieve.

Remarkably, Valeriana itself has yet to be surveyed in person. At present, LiDAR imagery remains the only detailed view of the site. The researchers note that field investigations in Mesoamerica rarely result in fewer structures being identified than LiDAR suggests. In many cases, apparent false positives are offset by previously overlooked features discovered during ground surveys.

For now, Valeriana remains concealed beneath the forest canopy much as it has been for centuries. The researchers hope these remote sensing technologies will reveal more such hidden sites in the coming decades; if funding is sufficient to cover more area with drone-based LiDAR systems, they are almost certain that more discoveries similar to Valeriana could await discovery.

The paper, “Running Out of Empty Space: Environmental Lidar and the Crowded Ancient Landscape of Campeche, Mexico,” appeared in Antiquity on October 29, 2024.

Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.

Consciousness may arise in systems far different than the biology on Earth we are used to, according to University of California, Riverside (UCR) researchers, who argue that many forms of conscious experience may be possible in alien lifeforms.

Eric Schwitzgebel of UCR worked with Jeremy Pober, a former graduate student, not to understand what consciousness is, but rather, to explore whether it could arise in beings that differ radically from Earth’s biological standards.

At a time when questions about the possibility of alien life visiting Earth are on many minds, their work examines what unexpected forms might achieve consciousness—the first step toward intelligence.

Substrates and Consciousness 

Central to the pair’s work is the idea of “substrates,” from the Latin for “the level below,” referring to the underlying material base from which something is made. Although the term may be most familiar from geology, it can be applied conceptually across many disciplines, from biology to linguistics, to describe an underlying structure or form.

The researchers framed their core question around what they call “substrate flexibility”: can a specific property be achieved across many substrates, or is it more limited? One example they use is computer data storage. Information can be stored in many ways, including optical, magnetic, and solid-state media, indicating that storage exhibits a high degree of substrate flexibility.

But what about consciousness? Can it also be achieved flexibly? Perhaps the answer depends on the specificity of the question and whether we are considering human consciousness or a broader concept of consciousness itself.

A Diverse Universe

The researchers began by considering the scale and nature of our universe as it is presently understood. That includes roughly a trillion galaxies containing countless planets unlike our own, which they estimate may have given rise to more than a thousand alien civilizations during the 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang. Notably, they do not focus solely on Earth-like planets that might theoretically harbor biological life recognizable to us.

“With that many draws from the lottery, some of these life forms will be strange indeed,” the pair writes in their paper.

This idea is not far-fetched, as astrobiologists have long hypothesized that life in the cosmos may take forms radically different from those on Earth, composed of available local materials, possibly including entirely different chemical structures.

The pair does not argue that such exotic lifeforms definitely exist in some corner of the universe, only that, in such a large and diverse universe, it is relatively unlikely that the same building blocks would commonly arrange themselves in precisely the same way as on Earth.

Consciousness Isn’t Special

Taking inspiration from the idea of Nicholas Copernicus, the researchers argue that since the Earth, and thereby humanity, are not the center of the universe, it is likely that consciousness is also not a unique feature of our planet, or even recognizable biology.

However, the authors are quick to note that simply because consciousness may exist in multiple substrates does not mean it must exist in every substrate. AI systems, for example, may represent a form of silicon-based life, but they are not necessarily conscious at present. Additionally, perhaps how they are conscious should be considered more broadly, taking into account the variety of possible substrates, rather than simply assessing how well AI models the human brain.

That broader perspective is a crucial element of the pair’s conclusions. Consciousness should be considered in terms wider than simply assessing how well something replicates the human mind. While the authors concede that a similar substrate may be required to perfectly reproduce human consciousness, a broader view of the phenomenon may be necessary to recognize forms of consciousness that are fundamentally alien to our own.

The paper, “Substrate Flexibility and the Copernican Principle of Consciousness,” appeared in draft form on the University of California, Riverside website on May 28, 2026.

Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.