Fact Check - 2. The Shift From Lunar to Solar Calendars and Counting
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Query: 2. The Shift From Lunar to Solar Calendars and Counting
Fact Check
Quoted text:
There is an ethnographic account of the first anthropologically inclined visitors to New Guinea, who asked the natives to count. They began with their fingers. But instead of stopping with the little finger, they kept on counting by touching the parts of their body, up the arm and across the face, then down the other arm—finally ending up with a clap of the hands, exclaiming “pongo” (Biersack[1] and Ifrah[2]).
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- ↑ Aletta Biersack, “The Logic of Misplaced Concreteness: Paiela Body Counting and the Nature of the Primitive Mind,” American Anthropological Association, American Anthropologist, Vol. 84, Issue 4 (January 1982), pp. 811–829.
- ↑ Georges Ifrah, From One to Zero: A Universal History of Numbers (New York: 1985) [1981].
