Lots of replies to you are missing the point I think. You are right, negative numbers are a useful concept which can be mapped to a number of real world operat

Lots of replies to you are missing the point I think. You are right, negative numbers are a useful concept which can be mapped to a number of real world operations, but that in some fundamental way not the same thing as positive integers. The same can be said of zero, of course. This is probably why it took humans ages to come up with such concepts, the jump is bigger than it seems after you think of this as "normal". On a related note, real numbers are far weirder than most people think....