3 ms·

I'm going to go out on a limb here and claim that humans have been able to count since before you'd consider them human. Lots of animals are able to count and

I'm going to go out on a limb here and claim that humans have been able to count since before you'd consider them human. Lots of animals are able to count and it's ridiculous to assume that any individual with even a rudimentary language wouldn't be able to. With which I mean to say that you don't need a formal understanding of 'mathematics' to count. Further there's nothing mathematically super special about the number 7. You might say "it's a prime, and also X, Y, Z", but there's pretty much an infinite number of properties you could find for any number you choose.

Keysh 6y ago
There are, even today, languages that lack words for numbers higher than 2, 3, or 4 -- including a number of Australian languages. This tends to be more true for languages of contemporary hunter-gatherer. (See, e.g., Caleb Everett's Numbers and the Making of Us: Counting and the Course of Human Culture and references therein, or this article: https://theconversation.com/anumeric-people-what-happens-when-a-language-has-no-words-for-numbers-75828 https://theconversation.com/anumeric-people-what-happens-whe...). Studies of people who are native speakers of such languages actually do have difficulties keeping precise track of different numbers of items, at least at the level of five or more. (There are Australian languages with more extensive number words, which is probably where the examples of "Pleiades = 7 women" stories come from.)