On Early Counting

August 25, 2023 timothywstanley@me.com

Figuring out when humans began to count systematically, with purpose, is not easy. Our first real clues are a handful of curious, carved bones dating from the final few millennia of the three-million-year expanse of the Old Stone Age, or Paleolithic era. Those bones are humanity’s first pocket calculators: For the prehistoric humans who carved them, they were mathematical notebooks and counting aids rolled into one. For the anthropologists who unearthed them thousands of years later, they were proof that our ability to count had manifested itself no later than 40,000 years ago... the ancient Mesopotamians must have been counting in base 60 on their fingers long before they, or, indeed, anyone else on the planet, could set out numbers in writing. The Mesopotamians’ unique counting method is thought to come from a mix of a duodecimal system that used the twelve finger joints of one hand and a quinary system that used the five fingers of the other. By pointing at one of the left hand’s twelve joints with one of the right hand’s five digits, or, perhaps, by counting to twelve with the thumb of one hand and recording multiples of twelve with the digits of the other, it is possible to represent any number from 1 to 60. However it worked, the Mesopotamians’ anatomical calculator was a thing of exceptional elegance, and the numbers they counted with it echo through history. It is no coincidence that a clock has twelve hours, an hour has sixty minutes, and a minute has sixty seconds.

Keith Houston, “The Early History of Counting,” - https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/early-history-counting.