404 Media

2025-08-16 13:00:43

A Strand of Hair Just Changed What We Know About the Inka Empire

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies that stood out to me this week, covering everything from silver to scat.

First, a story about an ancient Andean tradition that will somehow end with a full-sized replica of a person posthumously made with his own hair. Enjoy the ride!

Then: the health risks of climate change for children; you’ll never guess what came out of this otter’s butthole; and wow, Vikings sure were good at raiding, huh.

The tangled origins of Inka khipus

Hyland, Sabine et al. “Stable isotope evidence for the participation of commoners in Inka khipu production.” Science Advances.

For thousands of years, Andean peoples have woven intricate patterns, known as khipus, that encode information into clusters of knots and multi-colored threads. Made from cotton, wool, and often human hair, khipus are an idiosyncratic form of writing used for a range of purposes like arithmetic, census-keeping, calendrical cycles, and more.

Spanish invaders, who overthrew the Inka empire in the 16th century, reported that only high-ranking bureaucratic men became khipu-makers (khipukamayuqs)—though this assertion has been challenged in the past by Indigenous sources.

Now, a strand of human hair woven into a 500-year-old khipu has resolved this centuries-old question. Scientists performed an isotopic analysis of the hair, revealing that the individual who wove it into the khipu was likely a low-status commoner with a simple plant-based diet. The discovery confirms that khipus were made by people from different classes and backgrounds, and that Inka women probably made them as well.

Khipukamayuqs “have been viewed primarily as imperial male elites who played key roles in running the empire,” said researchers led by Sabine Hyland of the University of St. Andrews. “However, the indigenous chronicler, Guaman Poma de Ayala”—who lived in the 16th century—”stated that women also made khipu records, explaining that females over fifty “[kept] track of everything on their [khipu],” the team added.

Hyland and her colleagues found a solution to the discordant accounts in a khipu called KH0631, which was made around the year 1498. Though the provenance of the khipu is not known, the primary cord was made of human hair, allowing them to unravel the diet of this ancient khipukamayuq from the elemental composition of their tresses.
The primary cord of KH0631. Image: Sabine Hyland
The sampled strand was more than three feet long, and would have taken about eight years to grow. Carbon and nitrogen analysis of the hair indicated that it belonged to an individual that “ate a plant-based diet consisting primarily of tubers and greens with little consumption of meat or high-status plants such as maize,” according to the study. Strontium analysis showed “little marine contribution to the diet, indicating that the individual likely lived in the highlands.” Overall “this diet is a characteristic of low-status commoners, unlike the diet of high-status elites who consumed considerably more meat and maize,” the researchers said.

The team speculated that this long-haired khipukamayuq could have just been a proto-vegan, but that wouldn’t explain why there was so little maize in their diet given elites were professional beer drinkers.

“Obligatory drinking of maize beer formed a central feature of Inka ceremonies of governance in which high-ranking khipukamayuqs participated,” the researchers said. “Given the symbolic importance of hair in the Andes, and the frequent use of hair on the primary cord to indicate the khipukamayuq, our results indicate that the creator of KH0631 was likely a non-elite commoner” suggesting that “khipu literacy in the Inka Empire may have been more inclusive and widespread than hitherto thought.”

IIn addition to broadening our understanding of khipukamayuq origins, the study is full of amazing insights about veneration of hair in Inka culture.

“Hair in the ancient Andes was a ritually powerful substance that represented the individual from whom it came,” the researchers said. “Historically, when human hair was incorporated into a khipu’s primary cord, it served as a ‘signature’ to indicate the person who created the khipu.”

“For important ceremonies, the Inka emperor sacrificed his own hair,” they added. “His hair clippings were saved during his lifetime; after death, they were fashioned into a life-size simulacrum revered as the emperor himself.”

I strongly suggest we revive this funerary practice, so start saving your hair clippings for your wake.

In other news…

The kids are not going to be alright

Reichelt, Paula et al. “Climate change and child health: The growing burden of climate-related adverse health outcomes.” Environmental Research.

The climate crisis is a tragedy for people of all ages, but kids are among the most exposed to harm. A new study provided an exhaustive review of climate-related threats to babies, children, and adolescents, which include: food insecurity, malnutrition, water scarcity, bad air quality, infectious diseases, exposure to extreme weather, displacement, trauma, and mental illness.

“Children are particularly affected by adverse environmental influences, as their immature organ systems are less able to cope with thermal stress and disease,” said researchers led by Paula Reichelt of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research. “Moreover, their developmental stage makes them especially vulnerable to long-term consequences; early-life nutrient or health disruptions can lead to permanent impairments in growth and development.”
A visual summary of climate-related threats to children. Image: Reichelt, Paula et al.
“Due to the relatively modest global efforts by political decision-makers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, further global warming and the associated negative developments in child and adolescent health are likely,” the team concluded.

“Relatively modest” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. While I recognize the allure of doomerism or tuning out from these horrible realities, I recommend carrying around a manageable dose of incandescent rage at all times over the world we’re leaving behind to kids who had nothing to do with this mess.

Parasite lost (in otter poop)

Wise, Calli et al. “North American river otters consume diverse prey and parasites in a subestuary of the Chesapeake Bay.” Frontiers in Mammal Science.

You have to love a study that was inspired by an otter crapping out a weird red worm on a dock in the Chesapeake Bay. Curious about the poopy parasite, researchers sought out other otter “latrines” and discovered that these furry floaters eat a lot of parasites, probably because infected prey is often easier to catch. In this way, otters efficiently remove parasites from ecosystems; it may be a bummer for any infected prey on the otter menu, but is beneficial to the wider population.

“This study is the first to characterize river otter latrines and diet in a tidally influenced estuarine habitat within the Chesapeake Bay,” said researchers led by Calli Wise of Smithsonian Environmental Research Center.

“Our results indicate that river otters consume a wide range of terrestrial and aquatic fauna, primarily consisting of finfish and crustaceans, but also including frogs and ducks,” the team said. “Multiple parasite species were identified, including parasites of river otters and those infecting prey, indicating that parasites likely play an important role in both prey availability and otter health.”

Tl;dr: Otters are parasite vacuums. Yet another reason to love these cuddly creatures and forgive their more unsavory attributes.

Some Viking booty, as a treat

Kershaw, Jane et al. “The Provenance of Silver in the Viking-Age Hoard From Bedale, North Yorkshire.” Archaeometry.

We’ll end, as all things ideally should, with treasure. A new study tracks down the likely origins of a hoard of gold and silver items—including a sword pommel, jewelry, and several ingots—that were stashed by Vikings in the English town of Bedale, North Yorkshire, more than 1,200 years ago.
The Bedale Hoard. Image: York Museums Trust
Vikings are well-known for their epic raids (source: Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla) and this particular hoard included far-flung loot sourced from across Europe and the Middle East.

“The results indicate a dominant contribution of western European silver, pointing to the fate of loot seized by the Vikings during their raids on the Continent in the ninth century,” said researchers led by Jane Kershaw of the University of Oxford. “Nonetheless, Islamic silver is also present in several large ingots: silver from the east—the product of long-distance trade networks connecting Scandinavia with the Islamic Caliphate—permeated Viking wealth sources even in the western part of the Viking overseas settlement and should be seen as a significant driver of the Viking phenomenon.”

“The Vikings were not only extracting wealth locally; they were also bringing it into England via long-distance trade networks,” the team concluded.

With that Viking spirit in mind—skål, and see you next week.

North American river otters consume diverse prey and parasites in a subestuary of the Chesapeake Bay

IntroductionThe North American river otter (Lontra canadensis) occurs from freshwater to marine habitats across North America, yet very little information ex...

^{Calli M. Wise (Frontiers)}

404 Media

2025-08-15 18:00:09

A New Discovery Might Have Just Rewritten Human History

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For more than a million years, early humans crafted stone tools as part of the Oldowan tradition, which is the oldest sustained tool-making industry in the archaeological record. Now, scientists have discovered that Oldowan tool-makers who lived in Kenya at least 2.6 million years ago transported high-quality raw materials for tools across more than seven miles to processing sites.

The find pushes the recorded timeline of this unique behavior back half-a-million years, at minimum, and reveals that hominins possessed complex cognitive capacities, like forward planning and delayed rewards, earlier than previously known, according to a study published on Friday in Science.

Hominins at this site, called Nyayanga, used their tools to pound and cut foraged plants and scavenged animals, including hippos, to prepare them for consumption. Intriguingly, the identity of the tool-makers remains unknown, and while they may have been early humans, it’s also possible that they could have been close cousins of our own Homo lineage.

“I've always thought that early tool-makers must have had more capabilities than we sometimes give them credit for,” said Emma Finestone, associate curator and the Robert J. and Linnet E. Fritz Endowed Chair of Human Origins at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, who led the study, in a call with 404 Media.

“I was excited to see that at 2.6 million years ago, hominins were making use of many different resources and moving stones over large distances,” she added.

While many animals craft and transport tools, hominins are unique in their ability to identify and move special materials across long distances, which the team defines as more than three kilometers (or 1.86 miles). This innovation reveals a capacity for forward planning, complex mental maps, and delayed payoff of food consumption.

“What's unique is the amount of effort put into moving resources around a landscape,” said Finestone. “There's several steps involved, and there's also time in between these efforts and the reward. Although you see that to some extent in other animals, humans really separate themselves, especially as we get further and further in evolutionary time, in terms of the complexities of our foraging system."
Nyayanga amphitheater in July 2025. Image: T.W. Plummer, Homa Peninsula Paleoanthropology Project
Previously, the earliest record of this behavior in hominins came from a site called Kanjera South, which is about two million years old. Both sites are on the Homa peninsula, a region dominated by soft rocks that are not durable as tools; this may have prompted early hominins to search elsewhere for high-quality resources, such as quartz, chert, and granite.

Given that long-distance material transport was present at Kanjera South, the discovery of similar behavior at Nyayanga was not completely unexpected—though Finestone and her colleagues were still surprised by the scope and variety of materials these hominins gathered.

“Often, when you're dealing with these really old archeological assemblages, it's dominated by one type of raw material that's coming from a single source, or a few sources that are really nearby,” said Finestone. “Nyayanga has a lot of different raw materials, and they're using a variety of different sources, so that was surprising and exciting to us.”

Finestone and her colleagues have made many discoveries during their decade-long excavation at Nyayanga. The team previously reported that the tool-makers butchered hippopotamus carcasses which were probably scavenged rather than hunted, providing the earliest evidence of hominin consumption of large animals, according to a 2023 study led by Thomas Plummer, a professor of anthropology at Queens College, City University of New York.

That study also reported fossils from Paranthropus, a close hominin cousin of our own Homo genus, which went extinct more than a million years ago. So far, these are the only hominin remains recovered from Nyayanga, raising the possibility that the Oldowan tool-making industry was not limited to our own human lineage.

“It is interesting because Paranthropus is not traditionally thought to be a tool-user,” Finestone said. “There's debate over whether Paranthropus made tools or whether it was only genus Homo that was making Oldowan tools. I don't think that evidence at Nyayanga is definitive that Paranthropus was the tool maker. It's still an open question. But because we found Paranthropus remains at Nyayanga, and we haven't found anything from genus Homo—at least yet—there's definitely reason to consider that Paranthropus might have been manufacturing these tools.”

With luck, the team may uncover more fossils from these ancient hominins that could shed light on their place in the family. Finestone and her colleagues are also working on constraining the age of the Nyayanga artifacts, which could be anywhere from 2.6 million to three million years old.

But for now, the study marks a new milestone in the evolution of Oldowan tools and their makers, which eventually dispersed across Africa and into Europe and Asia before they were succeeded by new traditions (like the one from our story last week about yet another group of ancient tool-makers with an unknown identity).

The stones once used to butcher hippos and pound tubers offer a window into the minds of bygone hominins that pioneered technologies that ultimately made humans who we are today.

“What's really interesting about humans and their ancestors is we're a technologically dependent species,” Finestone said. “We rely on tools. We're obligate tool users. We don't do it opportunistically or occasionally the way that a lot of other animals use tools. It's really become ingrained in our way of life, in our survival, and our foraging strategies across all people and all cultures.”

“What was exciting about this study is that you see this investment in tool technology, and you see tools becoming ingrained in the landscape-scale behaviors of hominins 2.6 million years ago,” she concluded. “We might be seeing the roots of this importance that technology plays in our foraging behaviors and also just the daily rhythms of our life.”

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404 Media

2025-08-15 17:03:43

Behind the Blog: Exercises in OSINT and Storage Pains

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss OSINT for chat groups, Russell Crowe films, and storage problems.

JOSEPH: On Wednesday we recorded a subscribers podcast about the second anniversary of 404 Media. That should hit your feeds next week or so. Towards the end of recording, I went silent for a bit. I said on air sorry about that, a source just sent me an insane tip, or something like that.

That tip led to ICE Adds Random Person to Group Chat, Exposes Details of Manhunt in Real-Time. Definitely read the piece if you haven’t already. It presented an interesting verification challenge. Essentially I was given these screenshots which included phone numbers but I didn’t know exactly who was behind each one. I didn’t know their names, nor their agencies. It sure looked like a conversation involving ICE though, because it included a “Field Operations Worksheet” covered in ICE branding. But I needed to know who was involved. I didn’t think DHS or ICE would help because they are taking multiple days to reply to media requests if they do at all at the moment. So I had to do something else.

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Behind the Blog: Exercises in OSINT and Storage Pains

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-08-15 14:09:27

Pentagon Funded Experiment Develops Robots that Change by ‘Consuming’ Other Robots

A team of researchers at Columbia University, funded in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, have developed “machines that can grow by consuming other machines.”

Video of the experiment shows tubular robots that move by extending their shafts to inch along the ground. As the tubes gather, they connect and form into more complex shapes like triangles and tetrahedrons. With each piece consumed, the whole moves faster and with more elegance.

“AI systems need bodies to move beyond current limitations. Physical embodiment brings the AI into the messy, constraint-rich real world—and that’s where true generalization has to happen,” Phillipe Martin Wyder, lead researcher on the project, told 404 Media.

The researchers said the experiment was done with a view towards developing a “body” for AI. The idea is to give artificial intelligence a form that can grow, heal, and change similar to a biological body. They published their research in Science Advances under the title “Robot metabolism: Toward machines that can grow by consuming other machines.”

For the experiment, the researchers designed what they called truss links: “a simple, expandable, and contractible, bar-shaped robot module with two free-form magnetic connectors on each end.” Each truss link is almost a foot long when fully contracted and weighs more than half a pound. When the Links move individually they look like plastic worms inching across the ground, but their motion becomes more fluid and interesting as they gather to each other, forming complex shapes that allow them to move faster.
youtube.com/embed/UDYLUnniysU?…
Right now, the truss links are controlled by a human on a keyboard and not artificial intelligence. “It’s not AI-controlled yet, but that’s partially the point: this architecture is a step towards future AI-controlled self-assembling physical systems,” Wyder said.

Wyder and his team controlled the truss links remotely and ran the robots through several obstacle courses. Some of the motions of the machines were preprogrammed with specially designed loops with names like “ratchet crawl” and “tetrahedron topple” that the researchers could activate with the push of a button. “There’s no autonomous AI running in the loop yet, but that’s the direction we’re heading,” he said.
Image via Columbia University.
Wyder said that giving AI a body was in its very early stages. “Miniaturization is also on the table—more links, smaller size, finer resolution,” he said. “But I don’t believe a single platform will suit every task. Deep-sea robots, Mars colony builders, assistive home systems—they’ll need different form factors. The deeper idea here is the metabolic principle, not just the physical design.”

Human consciousness happens at the point where the mind and body interact. A person is not just the thoughts in their head, but also how they react to their environment with their body. All that stimuli shapes our thoughts. Wyder and his team are seeking to, eventually, recreate this phenomenon for AI. The research is exciting, but it’s also very new and there’s no way to know how it’ll play out in the long term.

This need not be a world where AIs are stuck in human-like bodies. He pointed to previous research out of Sweden that used a swarm of robots to form furniture on demand. If such a system were to break, we should not expect the average person to be able to replace the part. But what if the system could order a replacement part and repair itself?

“For this vision to become a reality, we must build robot systems that are intelligent in a way that allows them to keep track of their changing morphology,” Wyder said. “When the idea of modular robots first surfaced in the late 80s this was unthinkable, but I believe that our recent progress in machine learning could allow for intelligent, modular self-assembling machines.”

He also acknowledged there are dangers here. “With our current robots, the worst-case risk is probably a pinched finger. But yes, autonomy plus embodiment demands careful consideration of all the risks. Most robots today still struggle with navigation and manipulation. They’re far from being autonomous agents in the wild, but rather need our care,” he said.

Wyder also said that he doesn’t consider the ethics of this work as an optional part of the research. “Malicious use of robotics is a broader concern and not unique to this platform. Like any powerful technology—nuclear, biotech, AI—governance matters,” he said. “I don’t think this class of robot poses near-term risks, but that doesn’t mean ethical foresight is optional. We have to think about it so we can get it right.”

The researchers will build on this work and that one direction is teaching robots how to exploit environmental factors. “Imagine a climber choosing which rocks to grab—robots need that same affordance awareness,” he said. “We’re working on how robots can reason about their environment and use it to drive reconfiguration or mobility.”

Along with the paper, the researchers have a GitHub and Zenodo that contain the CAD and mesh files, firmware, software, and simulation code for the truss links. Anyone, if they so desired, could build their own bundle of robot-devouring-robots.

Roombot Swarm Creates On-Demand Mobile Furniture

All the furniture you’ll ever need is a swarm of modular robots

^{Evan Ackerman (IEEE Spectrum)}