Ancient knowledge is more accurate than you think. And it's disappearing faster than you know.
See what we're finding ↓San trackers score 98% accuracy. Andean farmers predict El Niño by watching stars. Aboriginal Australians remember volcanic eruptions from 37,000 years ago. We measured why, across 41 knowledge domains and 39 cultures.
r = 0.527 across 41 domains (p = 0.0004) · r = 0.893 blind-scored (n=7, p = 0.007) · 73 Prolific raters replicated independently (ICC = 0.97)
Explore the gradient → View research →Around 9 languages die every year. Each one may carry environmental knowledge (fire management, navigation, medicine, flood prediction) that exists nowhere else. We built a tool to map what's at risk.
~5,300 endangered languages mapped · The majority of medicinal plant knowledge in many regions is unique to a single language
Open the dashboard →What started as a statistical test of a fringe claim became a window into how geography shaped civilization. 8 databases, ~259,000 unique sites (over 550,000 database entries); 180,000 sites in the spatial-test subset. The alignment is real; the explanation is geological, not mystical.
Monument enrichment: 2.52× (Z = 6.74) · Settlement anti-clustering: Z = −2.91
Explore the data →Cultural content survives across millennia when something in the world keeps checking it. We call the architecture of that checking the External Referent Constraint (ERC): a five-component decomposition of when transmission keeps content accurate and when it drifts. Solstice astronomy holds for thousands of years; named-individual biography from the same era doesn't. The five components specify why.
Five-component ERC framework · What tends to survive is what the world keeps checking · Capstone synthesis in preparation
View program →Every two months, a language dies. With it goes knowledge that may exist nowhere else: not in any database, not in any library, not in any other language.
The majority of medicinal plant knowledge in many regions is unique to a single language. But it's not just medicine. Fire management techniques that ecologists are now reintroducing. Navigation systems that Western science didn't formally describe until the 20th century. Agricultural calendars tuned to local climate patterns over centuries.
Our research shows that the most accurate knowledge, traditions maintained by continuous environmental feedback, is also the most tightly bound to specific languages, landscapes, and communities. You can't relocate it. You can't archive it in a book. The process IS the knowledge.
The Knowledge Extinction Dashboard maps which endangered languages carry which types of knowledge, scored by the likelihood that the knowledge is empirically accurate. It's a triage tool, helping researchers and preservation efforts focus where the loss is greatest.
The empirical seed of the External Referent Constraint framework. A gradient across 41 domains separates near-perfect accuracy from chance — the original finding that motivated the full five-component decomposition.
41 knowledge domains. 39 cultural systems. Six continents. The interactive scrollytelling of the gradient finding, which the Culture as Computation program has since formalized into the External Referent Constraint framework.
Explore the gradient →70,000 years of human knowledge, encoded in song
A scrollytelling journey from the Out of Africa migration through Aboriginal songlines to the scientific verification of Indigenous oral traditions, mapped across the globe in real time.
Begin the journey →Eleven indigenous cultures, five continents, seven drug classes. All independently built ceremonies matching pharmacokinetic duration profiles.
Read on Substack →Why some traditions are stunningly accurate and others are no better than guessing, and what that reveals about how human knowledge actually works.
Read on Substack →Pre-registered predictions about Torres Strait stepping stones confirmed at 30-meter resolution. The observability gradient explains why some traditions survive millennia while others decay.
Read on SocArXiv →Measuring what humanity knows, and what we're losing. The Deep Time Research Institute is an independent New York nonprofit corporation quantifying the accuracy of ancient knowledge systems before they disappear. All research outputs are open access.