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How did Neanderthals and other ancient humans learn to count?
- aliasEli 5y agoNicely written article. I would guess that using numbers started around the same time that trade (bartering) started. > Peter Watson dates the history of long-distance commerce from circa 150,000 years ago.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade#Prehistory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade#Prehistory
- ffhhj 5y agoThat means they used to think with metaphors, i.e. a hunted animal is a mark in this bone. Also that bone is an information storage tool. In order to let others retrieve this data from the storage they first needed a language to share the metaphor.
- jjk166 5y agoThis blog post from Stephen Wolfram which was featured on HN a few days ago seems relevant: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/05/how-inevitable-is-the-concept-of-numbers/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/05/how-inevitable-i...
- a0-prw 5y agoWell then, the number line is the conceptual descendant of that tally bone ? ;)