Did Counting Exist Before Written Language?

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Did Counting Exist Before Written Language? · 1:21 · Intellect Plus

In short: Notched bones, an innate sense of quantity and clay tokens suggest that some form of counting came before writing, though how far the oldest marks amount to counting is still debated.

A 1:21 short film in the series “From Fingers to Qubits”, narrated by intellect_voice_01.

Sources used in this film: Psychological Review (American Psychological Association), via PubMed Central / U.S. National Library of Medicine; authors David M. O’Shaughnessy, Edward Gibson and Steven T. Piantadosi (UC Berkeley …, “The Cultural Origins of Symbolic Number”; Springer Nature (Synthese journal), article by César Frederico dos Santos, “Enculturation and the historical origins of number words and concepts”; University of Iowa (Iowa Research Online), accepted manuscript of Roslyn M. Frank's chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2021), “RMF%20USE%20UI%20Archive%20uploaded%2002.15.22.%204.7.2021%20docx%20version%20with%20Chris%27s%20changes.pdf”; Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Archaeological Journal; McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research), “Type and Token in the Prehistoric Origins of Numbers | Cambridge Archaeological Journal | Cambridge Core”; Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, Human Origins Program, “Ishango Bone”; African Studies Center, Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University (quoting the Mathematical Association of America), “Mathematics and Science | African Studies Center”; Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Archaeological Journal, on behalf of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research), “An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-writing System and Phenological Calendar | Cambridge Archaeological Journal | Cambridge Core”; Denise Schmandt-Besserat (University of Texas at Austin personal site), “From Accounting to Writing | Denise Schmandt-Besserat”; Denise Schmandt-Besserat, University of Texas at Austin (sites.utexas.edu), “Tokens: their Significance for the Origin of Counting and Writing”; arXiv (paper by Vladimir Pletser, European Space Research and Technology Centre, European Space Agency), “DOES THE ISHANGO BONE INDICATE A KNOWLEDGE OF THE BASE 12”; Nature (Springer Nature Limited), “How did Neanderthals and other ancient humans learn to count?”; PubMed Central (US National Library of Medicine, NIH); article published in Developmental Science, “Non-symbolic halving in an Amazonian indigene group”; Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science); paper by Pierre Pica, Cathy Lemer, Véronique Izard and Stanislas Dehaene, 2004, “pica_2004.pdf”.

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