Counting
Notched bones with grouped marks suggest deliberate tallying tens of thousands of years ago.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 2 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 2 thousand years
- Era
- Late Pleistocene, Quaternary
Bones bearing regular grouped notches — the Ishango bone from the Congo at around 20,000 years old, the older Lebombo bone from Eswatini — have been interpreted as tallies, and in Ishango's case as recording arithmetic relationships or a lunar count. The interpretations are speculative and disputed, since notches can accumulate for many reasons. But deliberate grouped marking is a plausible root of both counting and writing, and nothing else in the record is closer to it.