History of Numbers

The first use of numbers

It is speculated that the first known use of numbers dates back to around 35,000 BC. Bones and other artifacts have been discovered with marks cut into them which many consider to be tally marks. The uses of these tally marks may have been for counting elapsed time, such as numbers of days, or keeping records of quantities, such as of animals.

Tallying systems have no concept of place-value (such as in the currently used decimal notation), which limit its representation of large numbers and as such is often considered that this is the first kind of abstract system that would be used, and could be considered a Numeral System.

The first known system with place-value was the Mesopotamian base 60 system (ca. 3400 BC) and the earliest known base 10 system dates to 3100 BC in Egypt.^[2]