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Mayan prediction of world ending in 2012 may be a 'misreading' - it's just the start of a new era

An inscription found in the Mayan temple of Tortuguero make a prediction of an apocalyptic even in 2012 - with some conspiracy theorists predicting the world being swallowed by a black hole, the sun, or just clipped by a passing asteroid, Daily Mail writes.

The Mayan inscriptions refer to Bolon Yokte 'descending from the sky' in 2012 - a god associated with war and the underworld. But a German expert, Sven Gronemeyer, says that the whole thing could just be a misreading.

The tablet on which the inscription was found has a break which makes the end nearly illegible - but even so, the legible parts don't necessarily spell oncoming doomsday.

Gronemeyer said his decoding of a Mayan artefact with a reference to a 2012 date denotes a transition to a new era in the Mayan calendar - and not a possible end of the world. Bolon Yokte is a figure also associated with change.

Many Mayans also dismiss the apocalyptic predictions as largely a Western idea. Rather than the end of time itself, the inscription refers to the start of a new era.

The interpretation of the hieroglyphs by Sven Gronemeyer of La Trobe University in Australia was presented for the first time at the archaeological site of Palenque in southern Mexico.

His comments came less than a week after Mexico's archaeology institute acknowledged there was a second reference to the 2012 date in Mayan inscriptions - touching off another round of talk (and panic) about whether it predicts the end of the world.