Related papers: The Ishango Bone: Evidence for Intentional Arithme…
In the early fifties, the Belgian Prof. J. de Heinzelin discovered a bone in the region of a fishermen village called Ishango, at one of the farthest sources of the Nile, on the border of Congo and Uganda. The Heinzelin's Ishango bone has…
We answer to criticisms of O. Keller about our interpretation work on the Ishango rod, the oldest mathematical tool of humankind. Our hypothesis, that is widely accepted, is that this prehistoric rod is the first mankind manifestation of a…
How were surfaces evaluated before the invention of the sexagesimal place value notation in Mesopotamia? This chapter examines a group of five tablets containing tables for surfaces of squares and rectangles dated to the Early Dynastic…
Complex networks analyses of many physical, biological and social phenomena show remarkable structural regularities, yet, their application in studying human past interaction remains underdeveloped. Here, we present an innovative method for…
This article shows how 3D geometric morphometric data can be analyzed using newly developed distance-based evolutionary tree inference methods, with extensions to planar graphs. Application of these methods to 3D representations of the…
Archaeological excavations in the sites of the Indus Valley civilization (2500-1900 BCE) in Pakistan and northwestern India have unearthed a large number of artifacts with inscriptions made up of hundreds of distinct signs. To date there is…
A range of a priori hypotheses about the evolution of modern and archaic genomes are further evaluated and tested. In addition to the well-known splits/introgressions involving Neanderthal genes into out-of- Africa people, or Denisovan…
We show that for large enough $n$, the number of non-isomorphic pseudoline arrangements of order $n$ is greater than $2^{c\cdot n^2}$ for some constant $c > 0.2604$, improving the previous best bound of $c>0.2083$ by Dumitrescu and Mandal…
Oracle bone script, one of the earliest known forms of ancient Chinese writing, presents invaluable research materials for scholars studying the humanities and geography of the Shang Dynasty, dating back 3,000 years. The immense historical…
We present a new statistical approach to analyzing an extremely common archaeological data type -- potsherds -- that infers the structure of cultural relationships across a set of excavations. This method, applied to data from a set of…
An inhomogeneous random recursive lattice was constructed from the multi-branched Husimi square lattice. The number of repeating units connected on one vertex was randomly set to be 2 or 3 with a quenched ratio $P_2$ or $P_3$ with…
Art historians and archaeologists have long grappled with the regional classification of ancient Near Eastern ivory carvings. Based on the visual similarity of sculptures, individuals within these fields have proposed object assemblages…
Thousands of first-millennium BCE ivory carvings have been excavated from Neo-Assyrian sites in Mesopotamia (primarily Nimrud, Khorsabad, and Arslan Tash) hundreds of miles from their Levantine production contexts. At present, their…
Hashiwokakero, or simply Hashi, is a Japanese single-player puzzle played on a rectangular grid with no standard size. Some cells of the grid contain a circle, called island, with a number inside it ranging from one to eight. The remaining…
Analyses of a set of 47 fossil and 4 modern skulls using phylogenetic geometric morphometric methods corroborate and refine earlier results. These include evidence that the African Iwo Eleru skull, only about 12,000 years old, indeed…
Recently it has been discovered that on a stone tablet over 3800 years old, the Plimpton-322 table, are carved the geometric relations that exist between the sides of 15 right triangles chosen in a very special way. Due to its property as a…
Vishaps, or dragon stones, are prehistoric stelae discovered in the high-altitude mountainous regions of modern-day Armenia and adjacent regions. The first statistical analysis of their elevation distribution and size reveals that their…
Cultural heritage is the asset of all the peoples of the world. The preservation and inheritance of cultural heritage is conducive to the progress of human civilization. In northwestern China, there is a world heritage site -- Mogao…
Recent advances in neural recording technology allow simultaneously recording action potentials from hundreds to thousands of neurons in awake, behaving animals. However, characterizing spike patterns in the resulting data, and linking…
Late-Babylonian mathematics (450-100 BC), represented by some 60 cuneiform tablets from Babylon and Uruk, is incompletely known compared to its abundantly preserved, well-studied Old-Babylonian predecessor (1800-1600 BC). With the present…