A College Student Who Decoded the Data Hidden in Inca Knots
atlasobscura.com> Medrano comes from a Mexican-American family and speaks Spanish, so understanding the Spanish census document was no problem. Handling numbers and data came naturally to him as well, as an economics major. The challenge, as both Medrano and Urton note, seemed to demand a perfect alignment of his skills and interests.
I wonder how many unsolved problems there are out there with this problem. Problems that are solvable, they just lack one mind that can view the issue from the proper perspective.
I suspect that as the breadth of human knowledge increases, this type of problem will become more and more common.
The recent lichen genetic revelation that rewrote textbook definitions is similar, kinda magical coincidences in all the things that had to fall into place (or survivorship bias?/good writer telling story).
If you are not familiar with it - https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/07/how-a-gu...
> Thanks to his family background, he could speak German, and he had heard that many universities there charged no tuition fees. His missing qualifications were still a problem, but one that the University of Gottingen decided to overlook. “They said that under exceptional circumstances, they could enroll a few people every year without transcripts,” says Spribille. “That was the bottleneck of my life.”
This marks a significant point in America's status as an educational and scientific power in the world.
That story was so much more exciting than it deserved to be. What a great writer.
> I wonder how many unsolved problems there are out there with this problem.
Assuming that there are many, this has been to me a compelling reason why cultural diversity is important to a company/organization, for both social justice reasons and for the bottom line -- in terms of having people who can broaden the scope of your work and problem recognition.
You don't need to go out of your way looking for highly challenging world class unsolved problems: I'm versed not just in CS/IT but also in various fields of physics, thermodynamics, solid and fluid mechanics, automation, electricity, and electronics, and it's readily apparent to me that some solutions or effects are just obvious to me while being completely elusive to my colleagues with a good level but pure CS/IT education.
This is a case similar to biodiversity vs monoculture: complimentary knowledge fosters alternative modelling scenarios and patterns, nourishing the mind, not just drawing parallels but spurring creative thinking and easing radical changes of perspective.
I would be interested to hear some examples of this. Not doubting you but this would be very enriching.
One obvious example from my own life: Due to <issues> I needed to understand medical research in <area>. There is a huge opportunity in medical research for people who actually have a deep understanding of statistics. Or even an elementary understanding. Protip: just because P>0.5 it does not prove "no effect".
I would dare say the majority of unsolved problems are solvable by an individual with a unique perspective and set of skills. Having those people find those problems seems like a case of serendipity more often than not.
Hopefully people that lack the proper perspective won't lead those with the proper perspective to not even try.
Even more so, there is a question I asked a professor a long time ago.
Does learning make us dumber? As we learn things and take them as absolute truth, we limit our ability to explore new ideas and concepts. The search is sometimes the more important thing.
There’s a reason why Max Planck said:
> “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
It is a similar line of reasoning that led me to recognize that anything you can learn might be useful someday, thus learning as an activity is intrinsically valuable.
If you like the “proper perspective puts it all in place” meme, then you should check out James Burke’s “Connections” TV series (there was a sequel series as well), which is all about those perspectives in the history of science and engineering.
A few. For example, the Indus seals have symbols that may be a language, but no one has been able to decipher them.
Non-mobile link: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/khipus-inca-empire-har...
Since the paper has not been published, just be conservative and wait for peer review before making big announcements.
Great, I went to Peru last year and all guides said that the Inca knots were a mistery.
I grew up there and left in '99... they've always been a mystery. So excited to see that they've been (at least partially) deciphered!
Anyone have a link to the paper?
It is titled "Toward the Decipherment of a Set of Mid-Colonial Khipus from the Santa Valley, Coastal Peru" and is due in January.
What they actually found out:
“Manny has proven that the way in which pendant cords are tied to the top cord indicates which social group an individual belonged to. This is the first time anyone has shown that and it's a big deal,”
"Medrano worked with Urton over the next several months and the two compiled their findings into a paper which will be published in the peer-reviewed journal Ethnohistory in January. Medrano is the first author on the paper, indicating he contributed the bulk of the research, something Urton notes is extremely rare for an undergraduate student"
I read that to mean there's more, but it'll be published in Ethnohistory.
that, and he noticed the numbers in the cords matched the numbers in a census record.
And "The colors of the strings also appeared to be related to the people’s first names."
So the knots are basically census records? How disappointing :/
Writing in general began as accounting practices. Put your grain in the common granary, get some token (pebbles) for each measure you put in. Redeem them later. Then they started keeping the tokens in a box. Then they wrapped the tokens in clay envelopes marked with your family symbol. But they had to keep breaking them open to count them, then re-wrapping them, so they started putting hash marks on the outside of the envelope. Then they finally realized they didn't need to put anything in the clay, just the hash marks. Voila, writing!
What are you summarizing here exactly, how money was invented? It sounds very neat!
Babylonian Cuneiform.
None so fast. It allows us to corroborate the Spanish records with the actual records kept by the natives. That’s a pretty big deal in terms of finding out what parts of the conquest were fact what were fiction.
And to read any pre-Columbian census records which have survived, which is also a Big Deal.
No, it can be great.
The Inca had no money: http://www.discover-peru.org/inca-economy-society/ but they had to distribute goods for all the members of society. The knots were probably central to their organization.
If they find older records, it would also corroborate the claims that more Incas died from the diseases bought from the Spaniards, than by violence during the invasion.
These knots are census records.
> Urton says he and other researchers in the field have always had a general sense of what the khipus represented. Many, they could tell, had to do with census data. Others appeared to be registers of goods or calendar systems.
They've known for a while that many kinds of data were recorded with khipus, but (it sounds like) they couldn't read anything but the raw numbers, which were meaningless without context. Medrano has basically discovered a Rosetta Stone, the same data in both a known and unknown language, and it could very well lead to cracking the full language of the khipus.
And don't underestimate census records alone. There's a lot of tremendously valuable information to researchers there.
Disagree.
To me, it looks like a data structure. It would be really cool to find evidence of them using it to calculate taxes or maybe social status, level of political influence, property rights, etc.
...or to figure out whether or knot the interpreter would halt ;)
Not so disappointing if this becomes the Rosetta stone of khipus.
Thanks for saving me a lot of time.