Over millennia, humans have been better at inventing ways of writing than remembering how to read what we’ve written. We use marks and pictures and letters and symbols, but what they mean can disappear over time. We’re only now figuring out how to read the string writing of the Indigenous people of Peru, which until recently was thought to be essentially indecipherable. That was until Professor Sabine Hyland of the University of St Andrews found a remote village in the Andes where the elders had a superb collection of ancient string writing – known as khipus - and remembered a good deal of how they could be read. 

• Guest: Professor Sabine Hyland, anthropologist from the University of St Andrews
• Producer: Sarah Allely