A single lock of hair could rewrite what we know about Inca record-keeping
19 comments
·August 14, 2025marc_abonce
dyauspitr
You can tell if someone has smoked weed at any point in the past 3 months if your hair is long enough.
dingnuts
that's why stoners are known for having buzz cuts
geoduck14
Isn't this the reason why Britney Spears cut her hair a coupleb of decades back?
AndrewOMartin
The stoners who have an interest in not being exposed as such.
echelon
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.
WalterBright
> 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?
lukeschlather
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.
marc_abonce
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.
mc32
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.
nis0s
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-...
throw-the-towel
And it lasted less than 100 years, barely a blip by historical standards!
pie_flavor
Is there any reason not to suspect that this was a noble's khipu made from a commoner's stolen hair?
erazor42
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
WalterBright
Are these rich people prices?
warrenm
Alternative link: https://archive.is/E6AyR
metalman
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.
JSDHHGAKEJRDFJ
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JSDHHGAKEJRDFJ
[flagged]
> 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.