Mirador, not to be confused with Tolkien's Mordor, was first discovered in 1926 in the rain forests of Guatemala. However it was all but ignored for the next 70 years. it wasn't until 2003 that Richard Hansen of Idaho State University initiated the first truly large scale excavation of the site. What he has discovered so far is re-writing Mayan history. It has now been confirmed that Mirador predates the previously earliest known Mayan settlement by 1,000 years, pushing the Mayan civilization back to at least 600 BC. The scale of the city cannot be underestimated. Larger than downtown Los Angeles, Mirador had a population of approximately 100,000 people. Not only that, but by volume it has the largest pyramid ever built anywhere on earth.

CNN and National Geographic have been catching up on the most recent findings