Evidence of Counting

The first direct evidence of counting is two animal bones which show clear group marks. One is a 35,000-
year-old baboon’s thigh bone from Lebombo mountains of Africa and the other is a 33,000-year-old wolf
bone from Czechoslovakia.

The wolf bone found at the ancient human composite is especially intriguing. It was notched with 55
marks grouped in eleven set of five marks.

In April 1996, Oscar Todkoph of Hinderburg university discovered a 50,000-year-old mastod on tusk
(ivory of an elephant) which had sixteen aligned holes in surfaces.

He believed it was a musical instrument which proves that Neanderthals participated in music- a very
characteristics of human

The modern human-homosapiens, the “wise man” has been around for 300,000 years and we have
found human created artifacts that are at least 100,000 years old. But our oldest reliable record of
human counting is somewhere around 20,000 years old. The marking laid out on the surface of Ishango
bone discovered in Ishango region of what is known as DRC; are a series of long notches that are
grouped into three columns each of which is subdivided into sets

Though we cannot know anything for sure, it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to suppose that a
single stroke designates an occurrence of” one”. Two strokes is “two” and well, you get the idea. Taken
as a whole, the notches look like a tally system for counting lunar cycles.

The oldest mathematical artifact currently known was discovered in the mountains between south
Africa and Swaziland. It is a piece of baboon fibula with 29 notches, dated 35,000 BC.