In this undated image released by the National Geographic Society, trees grow atop a newly discovered mound over a house built by the ancient Maya that contains the rendering of an ancient figure, possibly the town scribe. The house sits at the edge of the ancient site of Xultun in Guatemala, a city that once housed tens of thousands of people. The earliest known Mayan calendar has been found in the ancient house in Guatemala and it offers no hint that the world's end is imminent, researchers said May 10. Rather, the painted room in the residential complex at Xultun was likely the place where the town scribe kept records, scrawling computations on the walls in an effort to find "harmony between sky events and sacred rituals," said the study in the journal Science. The hieroglyphs date back to the ninth century, making them hundreds of years older than the calendars in the Maya Codices, which were recorded in bark-paper books from 1300 to 1521. Some appear to be the 365-day solar calendar, the 584-day cycle of the planet Venus and the 780-day cycle of Mars, said archaeologist William Saturno of Boston University, who led the exploration and excavation. (Tyrone Turner/AFP/GettyImages)