There's a researcher I stumbled across recently who has a novel theory about 2012: he thinks we have the start of the Mayan civilization wrong. He believes that based on similarities, the Mayans and Egyptians were contemporaries and both (re)started their civilizations at the same time after a great flood (note that both have origin myths/legends along those lines). The fascinating part is, if you move the Mayan calendar origin to match the Egyptian Zep Tepi (beginning), then the end of that calendar no longer falls in December 2012 but exactly at the threshold of the Age of Aquarius.