Talk:Lebombo bone

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.

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)