Have people no respect for the ancients?

Several people asked about 2012 suggesting either the Mayas ran out of stone or couldn't count higher in order to debunk the theory. This is practically in insult to the intelligence of the ancients. The Mayas never said anything about the world ending, only the change of an era bringing about spiritual enlightenment. Don't any of these people recognize how smart these ancient cultures were? The Mayas and Egyptian and Chinese built some of the heaviest structures on the planet (pyramids), the built temples that cast eerie on specific dates due to important alignments. They knew about Precession, which many modern day people have no clue what that is. Their calendars were sophisticated and astronomy and mathematics were uncanny. Why don't people just do the research themselves and discover the immense knowledge the ancients knew rather than debunk all this out of fear of the unknown?