Article seems to resolutely believe that the entities 600MM+ years ago could not understand numbers and thus counting emerged recently many times over in parall

Article seems to resolutely believe that the entities 600MM+ years ago could not understand numbers and thus counting emerged recently many times over in parallel across a variety of species [1], but provides nothing to back up this claim ([2] is not supported beyond “an expert said). This is an odd claim —- based on the neural network experiment (which showed that gradient descent applied to object detection problems naturally results in the development of “counting” signals), it seems much more likely that for as long as beings have been interacting with their surroundings they’ve been able to count, and any modern slight differences in counting infrastructure are simply a divergence of the original counting machinery rather than the same thing being invented over and over by evolution in many different ways, but only recently (for some reason..?) > The fact that those three species are from diverse taxonomic groups — primates, insects and birds — suggests that certain numerical abilities have evolved over and over again throughout the animal kingdom. > Their last common ancestor “was [barely] able to perceive anything,” Avarguès-Weber said, much less count.