A single lock of hair could rewrite what we know about Inca record-keeping | Hacker News Reader

A single lock of hair could rewrite what we know about Inca record-keeping

science.org

79 pointswarrenm46 comments

> 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.

You can tell if someone has smoked weed at any point in the past 3 months if your hair is long enough.

that's why stoners are known for having buzz cuts

The stoners who have an interest in not being exposed as such.

Isn't this the reason why Britney Spears cut her hair a coupleb of decades back?

No, she did it as an act of rebellion and to reclaim control amidst intense media scrutiny and a feeling of being constantly judged. She described it as a way to push back against the constant pressure and invasion of her privacy.

There is court testimony it was drug testing - https://www.reuters.com/article/business/britney-spears-hook...

Can you link your source?

I'd say it was part of some sort of manic/meltdown episode with multiple things going on with some logic. She was under a conservatorship for good reason, it's not some Deep State conspiracy.

I'd like to hear her explanation in her words.

[edit] - From her book

  I went into a hair salon, and I took the clippers, and I shaved off all my hair.

  Everyone thought it was hilarious. Look how crazy she is! Even my parents acted embarrassed by me. But nobody seemed to understand that I was simply out of my mind with grief. My children had been taken away from me.

  With my head shaved, everyone was scared of me, even my mom. No one would talk to me anymore because I was too ugly.

  My long hair was a big part of what people liked—I knew that. I knew a lot of guys thought long hair was hot.

  Shaving my head was a way of saying to the world: Fuck you. You want me to be pretty for you? Fuck you. You want me to be good for you? Fuck you. You want me to be your dream girl? Fuck you. I’d been the good girl for years. I’d smiled politely while TV show hosts leered at my breasts, while American parents said I was destroying their children by wearing a crop top, while executives patted my hand condescendingly and second-guessed my career choices even though I’d sold millions of records, while my family acted like I was evil. And I was tired of it.

  At the end of the day, I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was see my boys. It made me sick thinking about the hours, the days, the weeks I missed with them. My most special moments in life were taking naps with my children. That’s the closest I’ve ever felt to God—taking naps with my precious babies, smelling their hair, holding their tiny hands.

> it's not some Deep State conspiracy

I know very little about the drama around Britney Spears, but even I know that the question was if her conservator was abusing it, not "the deep state". It's a case of the breach of trust of one or a very few people, NOT a grand conspiracy requiring a supernatural level of coordination and control. It happens with alarming regularity that people abuse conservatorships. It's an inherently very abusable position.

I hate it when people shout "conspiracy theory" over garden variety breach of trust/corruption. The latter actually exists, by using this accusation as a shield for it, you strengthen the actually unreasonable conspiracy theories.

Now that doesn't mean Spears' conservatorship abused their position, they may or have not have, but it's not something that can be reject as a possibility.

Spectroscopy is powerful.

There are various forms of spectroscopy that leverage different physical characteristics: vibration, absorbance, emission, charge, etc.

It's spectroscopy that allows us to read the molecular atmospheric composition of exoplanets and that has the greatest chance of yielding detection of alien biosignatures or technosignatures given our current scientific understanding and capability.

Spectroscopic techniques are vital for remote sensing, cancer detection, biochemistry, materials science, and more.

I wonder, for when I look here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_agriculture

They not only used wood, but llama dung for fires. I wonder how much C4 ended up in the food via their dung, just from the smoke and air rising from the fire, as it would be rich in it.

Still a neat way to try to validate diet.

OK, first: food is rich in C4. Food is made from carbohydrates, which as the name suggests is made from Carbon, and the amount of C4 in the carbon is homogenous across compounds.

So the answer to your question is: insignificant amounts of smoke occur in fire-cooked foods, and the C4 composition wouldn't be affected anyway.

I am incorrect: C4 is not homogenous, per the comment above yours, but really there just can't be that much smoke IN food ingested.

> 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?

The conquistadors burned most native writings they could find, and didn't necessarily write down what they were burning. They also killed a lot of people, along with European disease, there were not many people left who were able to write, and writing carried risks.

I didn't think the Incas had a writing system at all? That's why they used the ropes.

In this context, literacy would probably be constrained to accounting or similar forms of record keeping, rather than literature as we know it nowadays.

Or at least that's the mainstream theory about quipus today, although their content is still being disputed today.

Do we normally say Europeans or Chinese were literate 400 years ago, even with woodblocks and printing presses? Some people knew how to read and write and do math, sure, but would we call them literate societies? Even at 10% proficiency we don't tend to call societies literate.

Sweden became literate during the 1600s with most people being able to read at the end of the century and the elite were certainly literate before then.

400 years ago China was a literate society with mass printing of pornographic novels written in the vernacular and literacy rates probably approaching 50%. Parts of Europe were similar.

As I understand it, no mainstream scholar is suggesting that Inka society was that literate. Rather, the debate is whether any khipu literacy was confined to a narrow, specialist scribe class associated with the imperial administrative order or whether nonspecialists could also read and write, and whether a khipu written by one person to be read by another was limited to calendrical and numerical data or whether it could express a wider range of concepts: bills of goods, ancestries, perhaps even love letters.

It's estimated that even during the Q'ing dynasty, literacy rates were at or below 10%. Over 90% of people were rural four centuries ago. No way you had country bumpkins being able to read and write. Same for Europe. You may have had 30% literacy in the few towns/cities, but those were by and large a small proportion of the populations --most people lived in rural areas doing farming and related activities.

Your incredulity is due to Whig history and imagining late medieval and early modern China as being the same as Europe, but in fact they were quite different.

The Qing dynasty (or Ch'ing in Wade-Giles, but never Qing) caused a disastrous collapse in literacy rates, as a matter of intentional policy, bringing the literacy rate well below 1% by the end of the dynasty. But we were talking about 400 years ago, which was the Ming dynasty, when literacy was indeed widespread even among "country bumpkins", though still far from universal. Many authors writing in vernacular Chinese at the time included prefaces explaining that their work was directed at all of the "four classes", one of which (though not the lowest) was those rural farmers.

There was a lot of variation even within Europe; literacy in medieval rural shtetls was nominally a prerequisite for adulthood for men, for example, and universal primary education dates back to the Talmudic period. See https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d9hnt7/in_me... for more details.

About medieval Europe more generally, https://research.yorkarchaeology.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/20... and https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/68148/how-litera... look plausibly informative.

Literacy among "country bumpkins" was nearly universal 300 years ago among the New England colonists, fueled by movable-type printing and the Protestant rejection of priestly intermediaries, despite lacking the Imperial civil service examination system or the rabbinate as an incentive to study.

> but never Qing

This should read "but never Q'ing". As written it is nonsense.

You've jumped to a reasonable but incorrect conclusion: that only colonial writers wrote about the Incans. In fact, we know that Incans did write in khipus about other Incans, including in the colonial era after the conquest, because Spanish-speaking writers tell us so. So why can't we just read the Incans' own accounts, including from before the conquest? There are two major reasons:

1. We don't know how to read khipus except for numbers. Even that knowledge was rediscovered rather than being preserved and passed down to current archæologists. There's debate over whether there was even a systematic written language encoded in the non-arithmetic khipus at all. Maybe each khipu user had their own system for encoding non-arithmetic data as khipu numbers, so that each person's khipu was incomprehensible to anyone else. And maybe the features of khipu such as fiber colors that aren't known to encode any information actually don't encode any information.

2. The Spanish eventually banned khipu making as a form of idolatry and burned all the khipu they could find. So the surviving khipu corpus is very small, about 1400 texts.

So, a great deal of detailed historical information about the late Inca empire and early colonial era was definitely recorded in khipu, but most of it was burned, and we will probably never be able to read the rest; possibly nobody ever could have.

A couple things argue against widespread literacy.

1. The khipu appear to be slow and complex to make. It seems unlikely they'd be used to jot down thoughts, and so there wouldn't be that many. Compare with clay tablets, that clearly could be inscribed quickly and easily with a stick.

2. Easily erasing all knowledge of them argues against widespread literacy.

I don’t see how point 2 follows, given the context. Anywhere from 30-95% of the population was dead from disease and warfare - literacy becomes a luxury in those situations.

Widespread literacy could mean a lot of things as well. Is it 2% and reserved for priests or 70% and for everyone?

Well, also, 120 years after the conquest, 100% of everyone who was alive before the conquest was dead. Transmission of complex systems of knowledge between generations generally requires organized training programs, which were labeled idolatrous, and the penalty for failing to report them to the village priest was to burn in Hell for eternity. Nevertheless, we have khipu that were made centuries later, and the article claims that in some remote areas the art did not die out until the 20th century.

I agree that knotting a khipu looks significantly slower than writing with reeds on clay tablets or with pens on papyrus, vellum, or paper. You can knit or crochet at around 5 Hz, but nålbinding, hand-sewing, and macramé are significantly slower, and the khipu looks like it would be more similar to those techniques. In https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFeYJ2uukrQ you can see Karin Byom making 7 nålbinding stitches in 30 seconds, about 250mHz, 20× slower than knitting or crochet. At that speed you could write about four digits per minute (250 millibits per second), compared to about 60 (4 bits per second) with west Arabic numerals and a pencil.

But there are Chinese and cuneiform characters with dozens of strokes; medieval scriptoria wrote fairly slowly, both because blackletter is fairly elaborate (especially Fraktur) and in order not to waste precious vellum; and a fair bit of the Egyptian hieroglyph corpus is literally carved into stone.

So, while slow writing systems are at a real disadvantage when it comes to producing large corpora, it's not clear that that factor alone dooms you to having a total surviving corpus that you could lift in one hand. And it certainly doesn't argue against widespread literacy, since a khipu once knotted can be read any number of times.

To be quantitative about it, the simplest wordwise probability model of English (assuming the probability that each word is independent of previous words) is about 10 bits per word, so even using the known inefficient numeric khipu encoding, you could write about 20-30 English words per hour in khipu just by assigning a number to each one. You could write down the 271 words of the Gettysburg Address in a day. This is not useful for a shopping list, but certainly for recording historical events, propaganda, contracts, proverbs, laws, or hymns.

Some of the postcolonial khipu epistles do encode spoken language, possibly inspired by Spanish writing with Latin letters, but I don't know anything about the encoding.

> Widespread literacy could mean a lot of things as well. Is it 2% and reserved for priests

Sure, if you completely redefine "widespread" to mean "very highly limited", your statement is true.

> from 30-95% of the population was dead from disease and warfare - literacy becomes a luxury in those situations.

Such a wide range means they have no idea.

Yeah, we really have very little idea indeed of what the immediate pre-Columbian population of America was. There was an academic consensus for generations that it was pretty sparse, but there's some strong new evidence that it wasn't, so there's a whole big debate going on now. Of course it's a highly politicized issue!

I think https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_the_In... isn't up to date, but it is a decent introduction to the debate.

The estimates I've seen, just for North America, range from 12m to 120m, though the latter number is absurd.

Yeah, both ends of that range are way too high for North America, but about right for America as a whole.

You could imagine a civilization that fed 100 million or even 600 million people on food raised on North American arable land, and in fact such a civilization actually exists today, feeding about 600 million people; North America is a net exporter of food, and its population is about 592 million. Currently that's being done with industrial agriculture mining phosphate rock and fixing most of its nitrogen with the Haber–Bosch process because that is far less labor-intensive than the alternatives, but some varieties of biointensive cultivation are actually almost competitive with current industrial agriculture when you measure by yield per acre instead of yield per hour of work.

However, biointensive agriculture didn't exist 500 years ago any more than the Haber–Bosch process did, there's no archæological evidence there for such dense populations, and as far as I know no mainstream archæologist suggests a pre-Columbian population of North America anywhere close to 100 million.

> Maybe each khipu user had their own system for encoding non-arithmetic data as khipu numbers, so that each person's khipu was incomprehensible to anyone else.

That is the sort of things linguaphiles do, like JRR Tolkien, and certain highly neurodivergent people, but in general that's not something a general population would do.

By definition, it still wouldn't make them literate even if true: "I can only read and write my own writing."

It's actually very common in our own society for children to make up "secret codes" for their own use or to communicate with a single friend, and notation systems limited to a small affinity group are fairly common even in societies like ours where they have to compete with a standard written language: baseball game records, knitting notation, cross-stitch notation, chess notations, mechanical dimensioning and tolerancing, electronic schematics, shorthands, cement chemist notation, Perl, hobo signs, and so on. If you've ever worked in a company that is more than a few years old, even something as small as a diner, you can probably think of two or three notational systems used only within that company. In our society, at least, it's not just highly neurodivergent people.

I don't agree that being literate in a writing system nobody else uses is equivalent to not being literate.

Khipu literacy doesn't produce permanent documents like European writing - it's a tactile recording system using knots that would degrade over time, and Spanish colonizers systematically destroyed khipus as part of their cultural suppression campaigns.

Literacy can mean being able to read but not write, which seems to have been pretty common in the past.

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-...

And it lasted less than 100 years, barely a blip by historical standards!

That's correct, though the article mentions the Aztecs, but thinking of the Inca empire as a standalone unit is sort of dubious. The Inca were just the named phase of upper Andean civilization when the conquistadors arrived. Most of what's considered Inca empire was already in existence for a long time. It's much more reasonable to consider upper Andean civilization as a whole instead of just looking at the final administration and taking that name.

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?

Yeah that’s exactly what I immediatly thought, stolen or bought. It is common today that some people sell their hair to make wig for rich people

Are these rich people prices?

https://www.irresistibleme.com/collections/human-hair-wigs

Depending on where you live yes in some country 300/400€ is 2/3 months salary

or a noble's message written on behalf by a commoner 'scribe'

This article is a case study of non sequitur

Or that this particular noble was a "health nut" and stuck to a commoner diet. Or was simply allergic to corn.

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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