Good grief. Instead of studying these pieces of old string, anthropologists should be studying why the Incas were knotting strings to communicate something, while in Europe, intellectual giants such as Plato and Aristotle had been dead for almost a thousand years.
The Romans had constructed majestic Rome on the way to conquering Europe and vast swaths of Asia and Africa about 1300 years before these knotted strings were made. Why were the indigenous people of the Americas still subsisting in Stone Age cultures, while those in China and Italy were light years ahead of them? Inquiring minds should want to know.
And....In the U.S. continued to do so well into the 1890s. ( My grandmother was born in 1894).
You opine - “ Inquiring minds should want to know.” - in your assertion that the peoples here, at the time of the conquistadors - were ignorant knot tiers compared to the brilliant minds in Europe.
Yeah - ignorant savages. that’s what the whites claimed and maintained - to back up “Manifest Destiny” aka, justification for slaughtering and confiscation.
Yet, when the conquistadors first saw the cities in Central/South America - they marveled that they surpassed any seen in their home countries at the time. (So, of course, they set about destroying it all - AND burned/destroyed their books - so we have precious little to ascertain just HOW developed they really were. Some books, however, escaped or were hidden by a priest and spirited to Europe - like the ‘Dresden Codex”
then again, there’s the mathematics - based on a system of 20 rather than 10 - and their astronomy so accurate, they were off only about 19 minutes a year - we are STILL off a full day every 4 years. (ergo: Leap Year)
They had vast and sophisticated ways to bring the yearly rains down off the mountains, traveling many miles, to furnish the towns with water, Their engineering involving the growing terraces, watering etc, are a marvel - etc -
There are many discoveries that still boggle our mind as to “how and why?”
REAL “Inquiring minds should want to know..” the hows and why’s of these things in evidence.
One might wonder “What might have been had the Europeans not been so hell bent on gold, glory and power”
http://www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/civil/maya/mmc07eng.shtml
You would be interested to know that the Italians are trying to figure out what to do with an entire Roman library found at a posh villa in Herculaneum. Burned to a crisp, of course ... so, how do we read it all those lost classics ... what we have is a drop in the bucket.