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 and with different tools, which reads as a tally kept over time: information stored outside a brain. A bone incised by Neanderthals, in France, may push the practice back beyond 60,000 years, and objects carrying rows of marks are in use from the beginning of the European Upper Palaeolithic onwards.

Why it matters

Here begins a lineage that runs from notches to tokens to numerals to writing itself: the outsourcing of memory to matter. Comparative work on the astronomy and timekeeping of hunter-gatherer societies suggests that such material props are what let counting and calendars take shape in the first place. Every ledger, calendar and database on this timeline descends from the moment someone let a bone do the remembering.

Dating & uncertainty

The anchor is the notched baboon fibula from Border Cave, about 44,000 to 42,000 years old, whose marks were added at different times, as a tally would be. Incisions on a hyena bone from a Mousterian site in Charente, France, 72,000 to 60,000 years old and Neanderthal-made, may instead record numerical information in a single session; through the Upper Palaeolithic the marks grow more numerous and their coding more complex.

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