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Did a 15-year-old boy truly discover a hidden Mayan city?

Answer: nope

A boy named William Gadoury reportedly analyzed constellations worshipped by the ancient Mayans and noticed that when the constellations were laid over maps, they correlated with the locations of Mayan cities. But when news reports stated that no scientist had discovered this before, it raised a red flag.

According to Snopes.com, "if the story was accurate, experts studying such history for decades missed the findings of an untrained teenager" 

And that is highly unlikely.

One of the first news outlets to run with this story was Gizmodo, according to Snopes. Gizmodo later updated its article, including an assessment by University of Southern California anthropologist Thomas Garrison, who said that the purported Maya ruins were actually a fallow cornfield.

"I’d guess its been fallow for 10-15 years," Garrison said. "This is obvious to anyone that has spent any time at all in the Maya lowlands. I hope that this young scholar will consider his pursuits at the university level so that his next discovery (and there are plenty to be made) will be a meaningful one"