The Mayans - First Loopers ?

[Andrew Taylor <andrew@bocs.com>]

This was in the news today,

Echo of the past

THE Mayans may have made the world's first audio recording a thousand 
years ago. This is the claim of an acoustics engineer who says
the properties of echoes produced by Mayan pyramids suggest they were 
built to copy the cry of sacred birds.

Guides often clap a pair of rocks together to entertain the crowds of 
tourists at the Kukulk‡n pyramid at Chichen Itza in Mexico. The echo
that comes back is surprising, a descending chirp of "EE-oo". The guides 
say the sound was engineered by the Mayans to mimic anything
>from an animal cry to the ghostly howls of humans sacrificed at that 
>spot. But serious Mayan scholars have written this off as nonsense.

full story at:
http://www.yahoo.co.uk/headlines/19981012/newscien/908150460-201867272.html