The Ishango Bone - The World's Greatest Ancient Artefact?
While creating the next instalment of our Ancient World in London video series on ancient astronomy, we came across an odd little artefact called the Ishango Bone. Exotic-sounding, it's little more than a knobbled baboon's fibula, but the 25,000-year-old notches along its length are much more than a caveman's conquests.
Discovered in the then-Belgian Congo by Jean Heinzelin de Braucourt in 1960, the bone was first thought to be around 10,000 years old. Yet later tests pushed its date back another 15,000 years, around 20 millennia before the first-ever civilizations sprang from the Middle East. Today it remains on display at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels.
"Maybe the owner was a woman who was keeping track of her menstrual cycle, but this person was making astronomical observations 25,000 years ago," Paul adds. It's amazing to think of the people all those unimaginable years back, gazing at the sky with the same wonder we all do now.
The Ishango Bone might just be the greatest ancient artefact in the world - greater, even, than the Golden Death Mask of Tutankhamun. It connects us to our ancient ancestors so much simpler than other relics, because it typifies a primal thirst for knowledge we all still cling onto today. Look out for our video on ancient astronomy this week and see if you agree - we'll also be discovering Stonehenge's best-kept secrets.
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The Ishango rod is not a baboon's fibula. Nobody knows what animal it is from.
Also, note there are 2 Ishango rods, the second being revealed by the discoverer on his death bed.
Sadly the Australian publication from which I pulled the baboon info appears to have gone - maybe they saw your comment! I've had a read of your Ishango Bone pdf Mr Huylebrouck - could you elaborate on what Heinzelin said on his death bed, and why I can't find any further information about it?
The origins of mathematical thought lie in the concepts of number, magnitude, and form.Such concepts would have been part of everyday life in hunter-gatherer societies.
This discovery is more interesting than as it is due to its decimal system that can bear other historical inferences regarding all Nile's civilizations and beyond. Particularly Egypt, known as the stream end place of the Nile, used broadly that decimal system. Besides, local and present people are using it since ever. Moreover, the local preferred game, like Igisoro in Rwanda, is also using decimal system with binary, octal and hexadecimal ranges of pebbles.