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The Ishango bone on exhibition at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. The Ishango bone, discovered at the "Fisherman Settlement" of Ishango in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is a bone tool and possible mathematical device that dates to the Upper Paleolithic era. [1]
The bone is between 43,000 and 42,000 years old, according to 24 radiocarbon datings. [2] This is far older than the Ishango bone with which it is sometimes confused. Other notched bones are 80,000 years old but it is unclear if the notches are merely decorative or if they bear a functional meaning. [3] The bone has been conjectured to be a ...
The Lebombo bone, dated between 44,200 and 43,000 years old, is a baboon's fibula with 29 distinct notches, discovered within the Border Cave in the Lebombo Mountains of Eswatini. The so-called Wolf bone is a prehistoric artefact discovered in 1937 in Czechoslovakia during excavations at Dolní Věstonice, Moravia, led by Karl Absolon.
The Ishango Bone is one of the items that was found in Songora territory. While the Eastern Arm of the Great Rift Valley located in Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania has yielded the greatest amount of ancient human fossils, the northern portion of the Western Arm of the Rift Valley - home of the Songora - remains largely unexplored, although it ...
Ishango is a sub-station of the Virunga National Park, covering more than 13% of the North-Kivu province with about 790,000 hectares of extended landscape. [2] Located at the mouth of Lake Edward, the Virunga National Park was established in 1925 in an effort to protect mountain gorilla species from threats of poaching and deforestation, making it the "oldest protected park in Africa". [2]
The Lebombo bone from the mountains between Swaziland and South Africa may be the oldest known mathematical artifact. [38] It dates from 35,000 BCE and consists of 29 distinct notches that were deliberately cut into a baboon's fibula. [39] [40]
Between 25,000 BP and 20,000 BP, hunter-fisher-gatherer peoples in Central Africa (e.g., Ishango, Democratic Republic of Congo) used fishing tools and natural resources from nearby water sources, as well as may have engaged in and recorded mathematics (e.g., Ishango bone, which may demonstrate knowledge and use of the duodecimal system, prime ...
The bone has been dated to 42,000 years ago. [12] According to The Universal Book of Mathematics,: p. 184 the Lebombo bone's 29 notches suggest that "it may have been used as a lunar phase counter, in which case African women may have been the first mathematicians, because keeping track of menstrual cycles requires a lunar calendar."