While folks have been having a lot of fun lately imagining ways that an alleged Mayan-predicted apocalypse could manifest on December 12, the demise of the actual Mayan civilization seems to have been much more mundane.

There’s a chance, according to a recently released report, that the once-thriving Yucatan Peninsula culture succumbed to a combination of issues all too well known in our own society—drought, environmental degradation, increased population density, and a collapse of trade and the economy. Another recent study modeling rain and deforestation levels reached a similar conclusion.

The first report, which was published last month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Arizona State University professor B.L. Turner, examined archeological data for environmental clues to the depopulation. They found that at the same time the Maya were clearing large swaths of forest to be used for agriculture, they were also experiencing drought, according to a Smithsonian article on the report.

Clearing the land contributed to even less rainfall, causing crop failure, soil degradation and game die-off—all at a time when there were more people for the land to support. Eventually, the fabric of Mayan society began to rend.

“The old political and economic structure dominated by semi-divine rulers decayed,” the Christian Science Monitor quotes the report as saying. “Peasants, artisan-craftsmen, and others apparently abandoned their homes and cities to find better economic opportunities elsewhere in the Maya area.”

The second study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, uses climate models to determine that an up to 20 percent reduction in rainfall during the Yucatan rainy period coupled with deforestation at the time might have accounted for up to 60 percent of the drought, according to the report abstract.

While misunderstandings of the ancient Mayan calendar might seem to point to the end of days, perhaps their inability to adapt does provide some insight into how likely we are to engineer our way out of the current climate peril.

Turner told Smithsonian that the Mayan downfall came despite the Maya having "developed a sophisticated understanding of their environment, built and sustained intensive production and water systems and withstood at least two long-term episodes of aridity.”