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posted by martyb on Friday January 19 2018, @07:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the knotty-problem dept.

He made graphs and compared the knots on the khipu to an old Spanish census document from the region when something clicked.

"Something looked out of the ordinary in that moment," Medrano said. "It seemed there was a coincidence that was too strong to be random."

He realized that, like a kind of textile abacus, the number of unique colors on the strings nearly matched with the number of first names on the Spanish census.

Source: Harvard student helps crack mystery of Inca code


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Saturday January 20 2018, @09:35PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Saturday January 20 2018, @09:35PM (#625321) Journal

    Everything was not fine. Nations in the Americas fought. There were natural disasters. People were enslaved, sacrificed, slain in warfare. But they also traded widely with each other, built great works, developed cultural refinements in art, engineering, science, and the like. We know this because we can look at the architectural record. Unfortunately, how they felt about it was not widely recorded, and the few civilizations in the Americas who did develop writing and record their history lost huge chunks of it to the Spanish. There are only a few Mayan codices that survived the mass burnings, and a greater, though far from extensive, collection of work from the Aztecs.

    In other words they did the same things human civilizations did elsewhere in the world, but most of that depth was lost to the advent of Europeans in the Americas. The best current consensus is that pathogens unwittingly brought by the Europeans wiped out millions of Americans before the first conquistadors ever stepped foot on land. We don't yet know, though, if those pathogens were introduced by the tentative first contacts with the Spanish, the Basque fisherman who had discovered and voyaged to the Grand Banks before them, or the Vikings who we know for sure were at L'Anse aux Meadows and interacting with the Beothuks far earlier. But the Americas the conquistadors eventually arrived at were already extensively de-populated and broken.

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    Washington DC delenda est.
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