A discovery on Easter Island has once again brought the enigma of rongorongo to the forefront, a system of about 400 pictograms that no one has managed to decipher. The key question is not what these glyphs say, but who invented them: the Rapa Nui themselves or some European who passed through in the 17th century. The answer would determine whether there was indigenous writing in Polynesia.
Carbon-14 and algorithms against the mystery of the pictograms 🧬
Researchers have subjected the tablet to carbon-14 dating and analysis of organic pigments. Preliminary results point to a date prior to the arrival of the first European navigators, which would strengthen the hypothesis of a local origin. Additionally, pattern recognition models will be applied to compare the sequence of symbols with other known writing systems, seeking structural similarities that help trace its development.
Spoiler: the tablet only says wifi here 🤣
While experts debate whether rongorongo is pure Polynesian or a 17th-century souvenir, one almost expects the new tablet to turn out to be a tribal chief's shopping list. Or worse, that the 400 glyphs are the instruction manual for a moai and we've been interpreting it as epic poetry for centuries. At least, if it's indigenous, we'll confirm that the Rapa Nui had bureaucracy before we did.