There’s lots of debate about whether the calculations were measuring a lunar calendar or whether the first mathematicians were women figuring out a menstrual cycle. What we do know is that these people were using computational records and division. The ancient civilisation was destroyed by a volcano and archaeologists uncovered the bone in the 1950s. A highly sophisticated civilisation existed in Congo using mathematics that predated the Egyptians or Sumerians by 15,000 years.
One of the real tragedies is that so many people leave school hating maths, and never really make the link between maths and reason, precision, logic and truth. Maths moves us from superstition to proof, from conjecture to fact, from guesswork to certainty. Humans would simply not have evolved into the creatures we are without maths. And it shouldn’t surprise us that the story of maths, like the story of humans, begins in Africa.
Egyptian hieroglyphs, by contrast, had a means of representing powers of 10, making it easier to make grand pharaonic proclamations of greatness. Europe caught up through a process of intellectual osmosis, and by the 16th century we see Copernicus and Galileo and their mathematical study of the universe. The 17th century would later witness Descartes bridge the gap between algebra and geometry with his Cartesian co-ordinate system. All these innovations were the results of the “standing on the shoulders of giants” process, where ideas were passed down, tinkered with, improved and adopted.