It may come as a surprise to people who have grown up with numbers that pervade all aspects of their lives to find out that most generalized hunter/gatherers did not count beyond the number of fingers on one or both hands. Very rarely, they had numbers up to 20, and this seemingly was the status quo for the first 2 million years of human existence. Was human intelligence so low during this time that people couldn’t conceive of more numbers? No. Many modern hunter/gatherers with normal intelligence had very simple number systems, less than 10.
The major explanation to account for simple versus elaborate number systems is need and cost. General hunter/gatherers simply did not have a need for developing elaborate number systems. Most communities consisted of 25-50 individuals where everyone knew each other by name and where possessions consisted of few items–basically what a person could easily carry over long distances. It has always been important, for people as well as animals, to distinguish between one, two, and three individual objects. One’s life may depend on whether it is 1 or 2 lions that are attacking, whereas beyond 3 or 4, all that is important is that there are a lot. These are termed “subitized” numbers. Being able to distinguish 1 vs. 2 vs. 3 or 4 objects seems to be genetically hard-wired in our brains and in the brains of many other animals. We are born with the ability to make these distinctions, and from very early on, babies make these distinctions. Some linguists even suggest that this represents a natural “‘logarithmic” view of the world.
All counting beyond the subitized numbers has to be learned, and this means spending time and effort teaching children (or adults) to count and remember numbers. Think back at the time, effort, rhymes, songs, and books that were used to teach you numbers in school and at home. These are the “costs” of maintaining elaborate number systems. If you seldom if ever need to use numbers greater than 10, why would you go to the effort of inventing and maintaining systems to do so? Even if there was a genius in the group who invented numbers up to 100 or more, there is little doubt that he could ever convince others to adopt his or her system or to pass it on to their children. Generalized hunter/gatherers simply had no need for such numbers, but complex hunter/gatherers certainly did.
In particular, keeping track of the amount of stored food needed for the winter (how many dried salmon or strips of jerked meat were needed per person for the winter?), and keeping track of the contributions that were made to their feasts and which had to be paid back (with interest), demanded some kind of counting and record keeping systems, typically reaching into the hundreds, thousands, and sometimes millions. At major potlatches on the Northwest Coast, thousands of blankets were given away and needed to be repaid at future potlatches. In California, beads representing wealth were counted by strands of 10,000.
When do we see more elaborate number and counting systems begin to appear prehistorically? Precisely at the time that complex hunter/gatherers develop, that is with a number of Upper Paleolithic groups in Europe. The Taï Plaquette is probably the most dramatic artifact from this period with over 1,000 marks on a small scrap of bone that most prehistorians accept as some kind of record keeping, or tally. However, there are many other artifacts, often made on scrap pieces of bone, with notches or engraved lines that are viewed as some kind of record keeping. Alexander Marshack, Francesco d’Errico, and Lee Overmann have done the most research in this area.
In my portrayal for young readers of life in the Ice Ages (The Eyes of the Leopard), most readers probably will not recognize the importance of Sev’s description of bats in a cave as numbering in the hundreds or thousands. But this is an important detail emphasizing that the society at this time was a group of complex hunter/gatherers rather than a group of generalized hunter/gatherers.
