A team of researchers from the University of Bergen in Norway has been analyzing historical records from Mangareva—a volcanic island in the Polynesians, whose first settlers arrived around 500–800 AD—and have found that its inhabitants used a basic form of binary.
While only around 600 Mangarevan speakers now remain—down from several thousand before Europeans began interacting with them—the researchers were able to reconstruct many of the texts they found using descriptions written in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They found that the usual base-10 form of counting was combined with a form of of binary in Mangareva.
via Gizmodo
