Determine whether pre-colonial African practitioners of sona solved geometry-of-position problems

Determine whether pre-colonial sub-Saharan African Indigenous peoples who practiced sona/lusona sand drawings solved problems in the "geometry of position" (graph-theoretic problems in Euler’s sense, such as finding traversals that visit each edge exactly once), by identifying and assessing historical, ethnographic, or archaeological evidence of such problem-solving prior to or independent of European mathematics.

Background

The paper reviews circumstantial evidence suggesting the antiquity of African sand-drawing traditions (sona/lusona), including petroglyphs from the Upper Zambezi and a 17th-century illustration by Antonio Cavazzi showing a lusona motif. This context is used to argue that related ideas long predate Euler’s 1736 paper on the Königsberg bridge problem.

The authors infer that African Indigenous people were likely aware of what Euler termed "problems about the geometry of position" (now understood as graph-theoretic problems). However, due to the ephemeral nature of sand drawings and limited anthropological records, it remains unresolved whether these communities actually solved such problems in a manner comparable to early graph theory.