> Some researchers had speculated that literacy might have been widespread in Inca society, but Hyland’s discovery is the first physical evidence. Previously, “We had to rely on written documents by colonial era writers after the Spanish conquest,”
If literacy were widespread, why did only colonial writers write about them?
Cool article! My favorite fact about the Incan empire is that the University of Oxford is older than it.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/university-oxford-...
Alternative link: https://archive.is/E6AyR
Is there any reason not to suspect that this was a noble's khipu made from a commoner's stolen hair?
I have an old hand made carpet that was hemed and repaired with someones hair. In korea women would weave special sandles for sickened husbands to wear for healing, made from there hair, "hairwork" is common as a form of mourning jewlery going back.hundreds of years. I know of native superstitions and practices, around hair which are quite varied, that are still followed. And so, I will state the scientific principal that one data point, is zero data points, interesting perhaps, but the very definition of inconclusive.
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> the team took a small sample from the cord’s loose end and used an instrument called a mass spectrometer to measure tiny variations in the hair’s isotopes of carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur. Those isotopes hold clues to a person’s diet, such as the amounts of maize and meat they ate in life. Maize, for example, is among the crops that rely on a form of photosynthesis known as C4 photosynthesis, which causes more of the isotope carbon-13 to build up in their tissues than in many other types of plants. Elevated levels of carbon-13 in a hair sample would most likely signal a maize-rich diet, Hyland says. Similarly, a meat-rich diet tends to raise the body’s levels of the isotope nitrogen-15.
It's so impressive that we can estimate someone's diet from a hair sample. I had no idea that this was possible.