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I'm currently completing a corporate challenge where you count steps and head to different world destinations to find out interesting "facts".

Today we had a fact or fiction quiz at Machu Picchu, something along the lines of "Did ancient Incas use potatoes as a measure of time?". With the "correct" answer being that it was a true fact.

Here are some other links making the same claim, I'm not providing quotes because they are essentially the same: "Incas used the time it took to cook a potato as a measure of time".

Is there any truth to this claim?

I can't find any reliable sources and nothing on Snopes.

Oddthinking
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    "Peru's Inca Indians were the first to cultivate potatoes around 200 B.C. The potatoes they grew ranged in size from a small nut to an apple," <-- That would make a big difference in a unit, then the question would be how big of a potato was the standard, was there a standard? – AthomSfere Jun 04 '13 at 02:17
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    @AthomSfere When I was young I read that 'imperial' measurements like "inch" and "foot" were [based on the length of kings' appendages](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_units). IMO potatoes and kings both varied in size. – ChrisW Jun 04 '13 at 04:00
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    The Incas where star gazers as the Egyptians so it's more likely they used that and the sun to measure time (as many of the old civilizations). The potato doesn't seem so sophisticated in that context :) – epistemex Jun 04 '13 at 05:48
  • that just might be crazy enough to be potatoe. – user1721135 Jun 04 '13 at 20:20
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    @ChrisW: When you base a unit of measure on royalty, you base it on a specific person, not whomever happens to be ruling at the moment. Therefore your analogy falls apart; unless the claim is that the Incans used *a specific potato* to measure time. – Flimzy Jun 05 '13 at 07:01
  • @Ken-AbdiasSoftware I agree, many potatoes ago people used the stars to know at which potato they were. – Trylks Sep 08 '13 at 08:53
  • I wonder if this "fact" is derived from a casual expression. Eg, if "faster than you can boil a potato" was like "before you can say 'Bob's your uncle'" or "more than you can shake a stick at" – Nathan Long Oct 13 '15 at 15:05

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