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Humanity's primal efforts to systematize the concepts of size, shapes, and number are usually regarded as the earliest mathematics. However, the concept of number and the counting process developed so long before the time of recorded history (there is archaeological evidence that counting was employed by humans as far back as 50,000 years ago) that the manner of this development is largely conjectural. Imaging how it probably came about is not difficult.

The argument that humans, even in prehistoric times, had some number sense, at least to the extent of recognizing the concepts of more and less when some objects were added to or taken away from a small group, seems fair, for studies have shown that some animal possess such a sense.
With the gradual evolution of society, simple counting became imperative. A tribe had to know how many members it had and how many enemies, and shepherd needed to know if the flock of sheep was decreasing in size. Probably the earliest way of keeping a count was by some simple tally method, employing the principle of one-to-one correspondence. In keeping a count of sheep, for example, one finger per sheep could be turned under. Counts could also be maintained by making scratches in the dirt or on a stone, by cutting notches in a piece of wood, or by tying knots in a string.

Then, perhaps later, an assortment of vocal sounds was developed as a word tally against the number of objects in a small group. And still later, with the refinement of writing, a set of signs was devised to stand for these numbers. Such an imagined development is supported by reports of anthropologists in their studies of present-day societies that are thought to be similar to those of early humans.