> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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It's so impressive that we can estimate someone's diet from a hair sample. I had no idea that this was possible.
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.
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.
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.
If literacy were widespread, why did only colonial writers write about them?
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.
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."
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.
Or at least that's the mainstream theory about quipus today, although their content is still being disputed today.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/university-oxford-...
https://www.irresistibleme.com/collections/human-hair-wigs
This article is a case study of non sequitur
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