Women as the First Mathematicians

By Claudia Zaslavsky

Women were the first mathematicians ever! So claims Dena Taylor in an article entitled "The Power of Menstruation" (Mothering, Winter 1991).

The cyclical nature of menstruation has played a major role in the development of counting, mathematics, and the measuring of time... Lunar markings found on prehistoric bone fragments show how early women marked their cycles and thus began to mark time. Women were possibly "the first observers of the basic periodicity of nature, the periodicity upon which all later scientific observations were made" (quote is from William Irwin Thompson: The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, St. Martin's Press, 1981, page 97).

Let's review some of the evidence. In my book Africa
Counts: Number and Pattern in African Culture (L. Hill, 1979), I wrote about the Ishango bone, an artifact that has since found its way into books on the history of mathematics by Howard Eves, George G. Joseph, and others. This incised bone was discovered in the 1960s on the shore of a lake in northeastern Zaire. Originally described as a record of prime numbers and doubling (perhaps a forerunner of the ancient Egyptian system of multiplication by doubling), Alexander Marshack later concluded, on the basis of his microscopic examination, that it represented a six-month lunar calendar. The dating of the Ishango bone has been reevaluated, from about 8000 B.C.to perhaps 20,000 B.C. or earlier. Similar calendar bones, dating back as much as 30,000 years, have been found in Europe. Thus far the oldest such incised bone, discovered in southern Africa and having 29 incisions, goes back about 37,000 years.
Now, who but a woman keeping track of her cycles would need a lunar calendar? When I raised this question with a colleague having similar mathematical interests, he suggested that early agriculturalists might have kept such records. However, he was quick to add that women were probably the first agriculturalists. They discovered cultivation while the men were out hunting, So, whichever way you look at it, women were undoubtedly the first mathematicians!
(The above appeared in the Fall 1991 issue of the Women in Mathematics Education Newsletter.)
Author's subsequent note: In his revised (1991) book, Marshack has an extensive note on the redating of the Ishango incised bone: "The date obtained suggest that the Ishango tool with its sets of marks, its inset points, and its association with bone harpoons, was 20000 to 25000 years old."