1491
I'm reading an amazing book called 1491 about what the world was like before the Europeans came. Lots of interesting ideas, many of which I've heard before, but one of the most fascinating is this--the Inca solved their problems through textiles, not through metals. Bridges of rope, not rock--the Spaniards were terrified to walk across them because they didn't have anything holding them up, but similar bridges are still working today. Inca armor was made of layered, tightly woven cloth--it seems primitive now, but it turns out that it worked about as well as the metal armor, and was so much more comfortable and easy to wear that most of the Spaniards swapped theirs out as soon as they could.
Even cooler, it may be that the Inca created the world's first, and only, three dimensional writing, the knotted strings of khipu that are probably mostly numerical counting, but have enough variety to encode at least as much information as any other languages of the time--and it looks like it was binary! Of course, even the people who most believe that there is narrative information in the khipu have no idea what it says, so there's no way to get information out, but they're working on it, and it's so cool!
Even cooler, it may be that the Inca created the world's first, and only, three dimensional writing, the knotted strings of khipu that are probably mostly numerical counting, but have enough variety to encode at least as much information as any other languages of the time--and it looks like it was binary! Of course, even the people who most believe that there is narrative information in the khipu have no idea what it says, so there's no way to get information out, but they're working on it, and it's so cool!