Nature reports:

Some 60,000 years ago, in what is now western France, a Neanderthal picked up a chunk of hyena femur and a stone tool and began to work. When the task was complete, the bone bore nine notches that were strikingly similar and approximately parallel, as if they were meant to signify something.

Francesco d’Errico, an archaeologist at the University of Bordeaux, France, has an idea about the marks. He has examined many ancient carved artefacts during his career, and he thinks that the hyena bone — found in the 1970s at the site of Les Pradelles near Angoulême — stands out as unusual. Although ancient carved artefacts are often interpreted as artworks, the Les Pradelles bone seems to have been more functional, says D’Errico.

He argues that it might encode numerical information. And if that’s correct, anatomically modern humans might not have been alone in developing a system of numerical notations: Neanderthals might have begun to do so, too.

When D’Errico published his ideas in 2018, he was venturing into territory that few scientists had explored: the ancient roots of numbers. “The origin of numbers is still a relatively vacant niche in scientific research,” says Russell Gray, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Researchers don’t even agree, at times, on what numbers are, although a 2017 study defined them as discrete entities with exact values that are represented by symbols in the form of words and signs.

Now the origin of numbers is attracting increasing attention as researchers from a variety of fields address the problem from different vantage points. [Continue reading…]