Maybe because by the time hands were closed into fists, people had forgotten about the negotiating and gotten down to fighting. In other words, the "fist" symb

Maybe because by the time hands were closed into fists, people had forgotten about the negotiating and gotten down to fighting. In other words, the "fist" symbol was a reserved word for a very different purpose than counting. Or possibly more realistically: if the way you communicated numbers didn't rely on position to indicate magnitude, you didn't need zeros as place holders. You could just "sign", 3 * 100 + 5 * 10 (whatever the symbols for those were ). Hell, maybe the symbol for 10 was 1 x "fist" and 100 was "pump your first twice."