Ishango bone
Overview
The Ishango bone is a bone tool
, dated to the Upper Paleolithic
era. It is a dark brown length of bone, the fibula of a baboon
, with a sharp piece of quartz
affixed to one end, perhaps for engraving. It was first thought to be a tally stick
, as it has a series of what has been interpreted as tally marks
carved in three columns running the length of the tool, but some scientists have suggested that the groupings of notches indicate a mathematical understanding that goes beyond counting.
Bone tool
Bone tools have been documented from the advent of Homo sapiens and are also known from Homo neanderthalensis contexts or even earlier. Bone is a ubiquitous material in hunter-gatherer societies even when other tool materials were not scarce or unavailable...
, dated to the Upper Paleolithic
Upper Paleolithic
The Upper Paleolithic is the third and last subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age as it is understood in Europe, Africa and Asia. Very broadly it dates to between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago, roughly coinciding with the appearance of behavioral modernity and before the advent of...
era. It is a dark brown length of bone, the fibula of a baboon
Baboon
Baboons are African and Arabian Old World monkeys belonging to the genus Papio, part of the subfamily Cercopithecinae. There are five species, which are some of the largest non-hominoid members of the primate order; only the mandrill and the drill are larger...
, with a sharp piece of quartz
Quartz
Quartz is the second-most-abundant mineral in the Earth's continental crust, after feldspar. It is made up of a continuous framework of SiO4 silicon–oxygen tetrahedra, with each oxygen being shared between two tetrahedra, giving an overall formula SiO2. There are many different varieties of quartz,...
affixed to one end, perhaps for engraving. It was first thought to be a tally stick
Tally stick
A tally was an ancient memory aid device to record and document numbers, quantities, or even messages. Tally sticks first appear as notches carved on animal bones, in the Upper Paleolithic. A notable example is the Ishango Bone...
, as it has a series of what has been interpreted as tally marks
Tally marks
Tally marks, or hash marks, are a unary numeral system. They are a form of numeral used for counting. They allow updating written intermediate results without erasing or discarding anything written down...
carved in three columns running the length of the tool, but some scientists have suggested that the groupings of notches indicate a mathematical understanding that goes beyond counting.
Discussions
