Talk:Lebombo bone

Peer reviewed paper

Regarding the discussion below, this 2018 Royal Society Phil Trans B paper gives a date of 44-42 thousand years for the bone, and describes "44–42 ka old notched baboon fibula from Border Cave, South Africa, shows that notches were added to this bone at different times, suggesting that devices to store numerical information were in use before the Upper Palaeolithic." ... "This bone is an ideal candidate for an AMS [artificial memory system] with accumulation of information over time as the single factor governing the AMS code. Apparently, between 1 and 14 homologous units of infor- mation were recorded in different sessions on the Border Cave bone. This implies, considering the age of the layer in which the bone was found (44 –42 ka), that exosomatic devices to store numerical information are not an innovation strictly associated with the emergence of the European Upper Palaeolithic. Antecedents are found in Africa and similar or different devices may have been invented previously, in this same continent or elsewhere."

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2016.0518

Issues with article

I have communicated by email with Peter Beaumont who discovered the bone. He adduces evidence (which I have incorporated in the article) that the Lembobo bone is NOT a mathematical artifact.Neurolinguist (talk) 19:22, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

The problems discussed below are resolved by the new reference [1] which, without calling the notched bone the Lembobo Bone, gives a definitive description with extensive illustrations in the article's Supplementary Information Figures 8 and 9. Neurolinguist (talk) 15:18, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

The 35 kya date raises a WP:REDFLAG. It is poorly sourced. The "Lebombo bone" comes up with 4 hits on google books[1] and the 35 kya claim is referenced to a 1987 article in The Mathematical Gazette here. Clearly, this cannot be the origin of the date. The date must have been established by archaeologists, but we lack that information. An obscure source like a 1987 article in a "Mathematical Gazette" and the surprisingly thin attestation of this extremely surprising artefact in literature since should caution us to treat this carefully. The bone appears to exist only in popular literature on the history of mathematics, but not in archaeology. --dab (𒁳) 12:47, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

I found the 1987 article here. It is a single page note. It says "has been dated to approximately 35,000 years ago" without giving any information as to who dated it and on what grounds. The references cited by the article are

• Peter D. Beaumont, Border Cave - A Progress Report, S. Afr. J. Science 69 (1973)
• Graham Flegg, Numbers, their history and meaning, Penguin (1983)

So it appears that our only archaeological publication is the immediate excavation report of 1973. This is fishy. Even if the date had preliminarily been dated to 35 kya in the excavation report, it would certainly pop up in later archaeological publication if the date had been at all substantiated. --[[User:Dbachmann|

Even more alarmingly, the 2002 edition of Flegg's book, searchable on google books[2], contains no mention of the Lebombo bone. In 2002. It discusses the wolf bone and the Ishango bone but doesn't have a single word to say about the "Lebombo bone". Our only source for this "Lebombo bone" is thus a 1973 excavation report that made into "history of mathematics" literature through a single-page note submitted by three authors of the Department of Mathematics at Cape Town University in 1987. I am placing the {{hoax}} template at this point. --dab (𒁳) 13:02, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

• Peter Beaumont was an archaeologist at MacGregor Museum in South Africa until recently, e.g. see this article which briefly discusses the dig at the Border Cave,[3] but it seems he's retired now. So he definitely did conduct that dig, and he's a prestigious archaeologist who has worked with Chris Stringer, so he'd be unlikely to deliberately create a hoax. And he was doing radiocarbon dating in the area at the time:[4] so a dating isn't unreasonable. The question is, does Peter D. Beaumont, Border Cave - A Progress Report, S. Afr. J. Science 69 (1973) actually mention the bone? And why did Beaumont seemingly never again mention this bone in print? There's two options 1. It really was in the '73 paper. 2. Bogoshi et al. made it up. We can check this by finding the '73 paper, or asking Peter Beaumont. Actual pictures of it in this blog post[5] weight in on it being a real object. Also Bednarik cites a paper by Beaumont et al. from '78 about the Border Cave, saying it mentions a Middle Stone Age bone with striations.[6] Fences&Windows 19:59, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

• Blog author here. The second image I link to is from an astronomy book which apparently got the image from the original 1973 paper. Judging from his other papers, I believe Peter Beaumont simply never had much interest in tally sticks. The dating comes from other materials in the same stratum. In truth if the dating is wrong it is likely older, not more recent, for example see Beaumont's paper Border Cave Revisited [7] which re-dates the lowest layer at 200 ka. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.18.154.69 (talk) 15:32, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

yes, it's probably an accident, not a deliberate hoax. The upshot remains that this bone keeps popping up in popular "history of mathematics" literature, and it quite obviously either doesn't exist, or it exists but was misidentified, or incorrectly dated, or both. "Middle Stone Age" is clearly wrong. Even if the date is correct, that would be Late Stone Age. Perhaps there are "Middle Stone Age bones with striations" but that hardly amounts to tallying. We have a Middle Stone Age artefact with a hatching pattern right here, but nobody would claim this as a "mathematica artefact". All I am saying is WP:REDFLAG. --dab (𒁳) 08:07, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

"a recent re-analysis of the Border Cave baboon fibula (Fig. 7), which identified four sets of non-sequential markings, is taken to suggest ‘accumulation over time and a notational function’ (d’Errico et al. 2012)""Tracing The Emergence Of Palaeoart In Sub-Saharan Africa" Peter B. Beaumont and Robert G. Bednarik. Dougweller (talk) 11:11, 29 March 2014 (UTC)

Bushmen in Namibia today continue to use calendar sticks that are similar to the Lebombo bone

I added... Bushmen in Namibia today continue to use calendar sticks that are similar to the Lebombo bone. - an early mathematician 50.153.106.144 (talk) 15:35, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

One of 4 books of trivia written by "Pulp Media", fails WP:RS. Doug Weller (talk) 18:25, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

References

Picture caption wrong?

"Lebombo bone from Contagem, Brazil." does not match the information in the article Housecarl (talk) 01:10, 17 October 2020 (UTC)

@Jochen Burghardt: You added this — any explanation for why you thought the bone was from Brazil? Also the image has dubious provenance and although there are other similar-looking images on the web claiming to be the same object [8] (of which the image here looks to be a low-res copy) there are others claiming to be the same object that look totally different [9] [10]. I think the image should just be removed. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:30, 17 October 2020 (UTC)

@David Eppstein: Just to answer your question: I had trusted the categorization of the image at commons (File:Ossos de Lebombo.jpg). I don't object to the removal. - Jochen Burghardt (talk) 07:16, 17 October 2020 (UTC)

Where is it?

Where is this bone. Is it on public display? Jason Quinn (talk) 14:56, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

We should remove reference to David Darling's The Universal Book of Mathematics

I don't see what is notable about this author, and having now scrolled through his bibliography (with works such as

• We Are Not Alone: Why We Have Already Found Extraterrestrial Life (2010). ISBN 978-1-85168-719-0 (paperback),
• The Extraterrestrial Encyclopedia: An Alphabetical Reference to All Life in the Universe (2000) ISBN 978-0-8129-3248-5 (paperback)), and
• Zen Physics: The Science of Death, the Logic of Reincarnation (1996). ISBN 0-06-017352-1 (hardcover)

), I feel strongly that mere reference and speculation about the object in question is insufficient reason to include it in the article.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding the meaning of

This bone is an ideal candidate for an AMS [artificial memory system] with accumulation of information over time as the single factor governing the AMS code. Apparently, between 1 and 14 homologous units of infor- mation were recorded in different sessions...

but it seems to me that, at the very least, this group of experts are unwilling to draw any conclusion towards the bone being used as a time-piece.

An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-writing System and Phenological Calendar (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/an-upper-palaeolithic-protowriting-system-and-phenological-calendar/6F2AD8A705888F2226FE857840B4FE19) indicates that the date of transition from using wall markings like hand-prints or dots towards other mediums such as bone engravings to be roughly 35,000BP.

If David Darling's assertion is true, this transition may have happened 7000-9000 years earlier. Ostip (talk) 23:43, 30 October 2024 (UTC)