If the name of this ending baktun really means "rebirth" or "renaissance", then the real catastrophe occured 394 years ago, in 1618, just because of the conquest of America by Spanish troops : which meant a massive death of lots of Amerindians (most of them due to imported infections, to which Amerindians were not protected, but also due to the end of development of the Mayan civilization caused by their internal wars, their concentration in giant cities which lacked the resources to survive in a more concentrated territory). So since 1618, the Mayans have changed completely of civilization, and became a minority. They are now being recognized with more respect (including for their native languages that was largely ignored when Spanish became official). The "rebirth" or "renaissance" just started with the European Renaissance (ending Middle-Age), and this is a strange coincidence.
Well, not everybody thinks that this ending baktun was really the last one in the cycle (are there 12 or 13 baktuns in the longest cycle ? Mayans may have just stopped counting after that, certainly because their past civilization was already ending at that time, or because nobody knows how they were counting these long cycles of more than 12 or 13 baktun, or if they counted them starting by zero or one and even Mayans can't tell when the historic first cycle really occured in the past, just like we don't know really where to start the proleptic Julian calendar (in 4714 BC, really ?), in a time where history of dates was not written. (Even the Julian dates up to J.C. birth in the Christian are a reconstruction imagined during the 6th Century, several centuries after the Julian calendar was normalized : years werre still counted after a Roman Emperor or other political rulers in separate eras, even if the length of a year was formalized in 325 in the Concile of Nicea for unifying the various "Julian" calendars used in Europe, so even today, we still don't know the exact date Jesus Christ was really born, or when exactly the Julian calendar started under Julius Caesar : various options are still possible for matching Roman eras with the modern Julian calendar still used today, notably for some question : was 4 AD a leap year or not and when Augustus really suspended the triennial leap years, for correctly determining when the Julius Caesar calendar really started ; the most recent proposal for matching dates in the Julius Caesar era was created in 2003 after the discovery of an old Egyptian papyrus, matching Julius Caesar's era years with Egyptian dates). If we don't know when the Julian calendar started, then we also don't know really how to match the Gregorian calendar with it. We also don't know exactly when the Mayan calendar started, or if this was also just a reconstruction (with more or less historic approximations). Let's just learn something : the human history is not written since very long. And most of it as been reconstructed with lots of errors (notably of interpretation of old texts or because we can't figure out the validity of these old texts to know if they were accurate too in the time where they were written).
