Who Needs NUMBERS?
Long ago, people didn’t need a lot of fancy numbers. After all, you know who your children are; why would you need to know that there are “4” of them?
But when small villages grew into big cities, people started to need bigger numbers to count sacks of grain, make trades, and collect taxes.
The First Counters 35,000–20,000 BCE
Tally marks—making a single line for each object counted—were probably the earliest numbers. Ancient animal bones scratched with tally marks have been found in Africa and Europe. This 25,000-year-old bone, called the Ishango bone, is from the Congo.
