I was searching through the 2001 World Book for Mac OSX, for fun, and happened upon Aztec religion. The Aztecs believed that the earth's timeline had been divided up into a series of stages, or, as they called them, suns. They thought they were in the fifth sun. Now, all the preceeding suns had to have ended somehow, so they decided that the earth had been destroyed. The first time it was by jaguars, which seems kinda far fetched, but only kinda. The next stage was destroyed by a hurricane. Then fire rained from the sky, then a giant flood. The current sun will, in theory, be destroyed by an earthquake.
I like this chain of reasoning.
The jaguars I have a hard time explaining, but the other catastrophic events all match up to some cataclysmic event. The hurricane would be the First Rain. Originally, the Earth was a large, red-hot mass of rock. All of the chemicals that could boil out, did, and they formed a massive cloud that then rained down. The rain cooled the land enough that life could begin. And there is the second sun.
The Second sun was destroyed by fire raining down from the sky. This would have been the age of the dinosaurs, and we all have a pretty good idea of what happened to the dinosaurs. A giant comet or meteor struck the earth. From a viewpoint on earth it would look like a giant ball of fire. Many scientists are in agreement that the comet hit in the Gulf of Mexico area, and the Aztecs would have been in Alarming Proximity to the disaster. Granted, no humans existed back then. So begins the third sun.
Bible-toting, creationist people enjoy pointing to the scientific evidence for a great flood. And the evidence is indeed there, which supports the Aztecs as well. I would like to point out, however, that many religions mention a great flood. If it crosses the borders of many religions on both sides of the globe, I would say it is probably fact anyway. Interpretation in the religions I would not say is fact, but that it happened is probably undeniable. And now we enter the current, fifth sun.
The Aztecs believe this will end with a great earthquake. This is indeed a possibility. The San Andreas Fault line has not had release for far too long at this stage. When it does let go in a final orgasm of epic proportions it could be enough to shake this world like so much Jiffy Pop on a stove. The resulting shift could also set off the "Ring of Fire," a series of volcanoes on fault lines that makes a rough circle from Japan up to Russia, over to Alaska, down the coast to California and then back across the Pacific through the Hawiian Islands and back up to Japan. Needless to say if these all vented in roughly the same time the consequences would be pandemic and would be a considerable set-back in the ever quickening forward stride of humanity.

That the Aztecs could realize these things is not so improbable. We have made these theories on the world and its long history, and the Aztecs were an extremely advanced people. Their focus on the stars is incredible. Any civilization with a reasonable level of deductive logic can figure it out. The clues are all there.

The prospect of doing more research on this topic interests me, if anyone notices any fallacies in my logic please feel free to comment. This does not include religious interpretation, or anything you feel is religious fact, unless it is Aztec-ian in nature. The Aztecs 'inherited' the ideas of many other religions when they conquered certain areas, so if it pertains to any early Central American ideology it can be included.