Answer to Question #350085 in Geometry for Sihle

Question

1.1 Counting

(a) Where in the world do we find some early evidence that people counted? (1)

(b) Approximately to what year does this evidence date back? (1)

(c) Give detail of how counting was done in the example which you chose. (2)

(c) Where in CAPS is this type of counting covered as a topic? (1)

Answer 1

The earliest direct evidence of counting is two animal bones which show clear group marks. One is a 35,000-year-old baboon's thigh bone from the Lebombo Mountains of Africa and the other is a 33,000-year-old wolf bone from Czechoslovakia.

Common intuition, and recently discovered evidence, indicates that numbers and counting began with the number one. (Even though in the beginning, they likely didn’t have a name for it.) The first solid evidence of the existence of the number one, and that someone was using it to count, appears about 20,000 years ago. It was just a unified series of unified lines cut into a bone. It’s called the Ishango Bone.

The Ishango Bone (it’s a fibula of a baboon) was found in the Congo region of Africa in 1960. The lines cut into the bone are too uniform to be accidental. Archaeologists believe the lines were tally marks to keep track of something, but what that was isn’t clear.

But numbers, and counting, didn’t truly come into being until the rise of cities. Indeed numbers and counting weren’t really needed until then. Numbers, and counting, began about 4,000 BC in Sumeria, one of the earliest civilizations. With so many people, livestock, crops and artisan goods located in the same place, cities needed a way to organize and keep track of it all, as it was used up, added to or traded.

Their method of counting began as a series of tokens. Each token a man held represented something tangible, say five chickens. If a man had five chickens he was given five tokens. When he traded or killed one of his chickens, one of his tokens was removed. This was a big step in the history of numbers and counting because with that step subtraction — and thus the invention of arithmetic — was invented.