"What are you doing at work today, Fred?"
"I've had this idea in the back of my mind for something called a zero. I might give it a go now that I have a new stick".
I’ve got a bone to pick with whoever came up with Algebra.
So this is right around the boundary between the Paleolithic and Mesolithic periods.
It probably went something like this:
Paleolithic father:
Son, go over to your uncle's hut and get me an arrowhead, another arrowhead, and another arrowhead.
Mesolithic son:
You mean "three" of them?
They were credit cards. When you were sitting around the fire with the chief you could show him proof of how many horses or cows or sheep or goats you had to trade for his daughter. And if you lied, or your true wealth was not correct you died.
How about this theory:
The Origins of Numbers May Lie in our fingers and toes.
There was a big fire that burned all their paper documents and melted all the copper scrolls, so they had no choice but to scratch marks on bone and rocks.
Like the count string I had tied to my loadbearing harness...
Napier’s bones?
“The first known writing dates to about 3,400 BCE in Mesopotamia...”
I was going to post something like “Amazing how they were able to have farming and living in a civilization so much earlier than writing.” But I had to google it to see when that happened. 3,400 BC - which of course makes sense.
I must be thinking of some other major change that happened shortly after the last glacial ice period 15,000 years ago.
It is shameful to compare medieval England’s tally sticks to Aboriginal Australian message sticks. In the former culture, systematic mathematics was already a discipline, whereas the Aboriginals still are illiterate.