Modern people take numbers for granted, because people are taught to count from an early age, so no one has any problems with counting the remaining cash, steps taken, days before an important event. But how exactly did people learn to count, and when did it happen?
Instructions
Step 1
It is easy for today's young children to learn the basics of counting, since parents, older brothers and sisters, and the education system are at their service. And the world around us is almost completely connected with numbers and numbers. However, it was much more difficult for primitive people, since there was nothing to start from. Scientists believe that in the beginning, our ancestors learned to isolate individual objects from sets, for example, one person from a tribe or one bird from a flock. Thus, the opposition "one" and "many" appeared.
Step 2
The next step was the association with paired objects. To explain to his fellow tribesmen that he had met two deer, primitive man showed two hands or two fingers. By the way, it was the fingers that played a big role not only in teaching counting to ancient people, but also in the formation of the most popular number system at the moment - decimal. In the languages of many peoples, small numbers are still associated with material objects, for example, the number "two" in Tibetan sounds the same as the word "wings".
Step 3
Having learned to count, albeit to certain limits, people began to think about writing numbers and numbers. Initially, these were just knots, notches, sticks drawn. Of course, such a recording system was extremely inconvenient, because in order to designate any large number, you had to draw the corresponding number of sticks. Therefore, number systems were invented, when a certain number of units were combined into the next digit. For example, in the decimal system, ten units are indicated by one digit, but shifted by one digit.
Step 4
The first such system was invented in Ancient Babylon, but the number 60 was used as the basis, which was rather inconvenient. And the modern decimal system appeared in India around the 6th century AD. It came to Europe thanks to the Arabs, therefore, the numbers familiar to everyone are still called Arabic, in contrast to the Roman numerals that were used in the days of Ancient Rome on the territory of Europe. The Arabic decimal number system greatly facilitated basic mathematical operations, which allowed science to step far ahead.
