LANGUAGE × TECHNOLOGY

Notches Before Numbers

~43,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial

Long before numerals, people kept count by cutting notches into bone. Microscopy shows that the marks on a baboon fibula from Border Cave, South Africa, some 44,000 to 42,000 years old, were added on different occasions with different tools: a running tally, information stored outside a brain. A Neanderthal-marked bone from France may push the practice back beyond 60,000 years, and marked tallies accompany the whole European Upper Palaeolithic.

Why it matters

This is the root of a lineage that runs from notches to tokens to numerals to writing itself: the outsourcing of memory to matter. Comparative work on hunter-gatherer astronomy and timekeeping suggests such material scaffolds are how counting and calendars grow at all. Every ledger, calendar and database on this timeline descends from the decision to let a bone remember for you.

Dating & uncertainty

The anchor is the notched baboon fibula of Border Cave, about 44,000 to 42,000 years old, whose marks were added at different times, the signature of a tally. Incisions on a hyena bone from a Mousterian site in Charente, France, 72,000 to 60,000 years old and Neanderthal-made, may record numerical information in a single session; sequentially marked objects then run through the whole Upper Palaeolithic.

Sources

1. d'Errico et al. (2018), Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B · From number sense to number symbols: an archaeological perspectivedoi:10.1098/rstb.2016.0518
2. d'Errico et al. (2012), PNAS · Early evidence of San material culture represented by organic artifacts from Border Cave, South Africadoi:10.1073/pnas.1204213109
3. Overmann (2013), Cambridge Archaeological Journal · Material scaffolds in numbers and timedoi:10.1017/S0959774313000024

Our species’ history as one day

20:43:253 h 17 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day