Modern people take numbers as a given, because people are taught to count from an early age, so no one has problems calculating the remaining cash, steps taken, days before an important event. But how exactly did people learn to count, and when did this happen?
Instruction manual
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It is easy for today's young children to learn the basics of counting, as their parents, older brothers and sisters, and the education system are at their service. And the world around us is almost completely associated with numbers and numbers. However, primitive people were much more difficult, because there was nothing to start from. Scientists believe that at first 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 of "one" and "many."
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The next step was the association with paired items. To explain to his fellow tribesmen that he had met two deers, a primitive man showed two hands or two fingers. By the way, it was the fingers that played a big role not only in learning to count the ancient people, but also in becoming the most popular number system at the moment - decimal. In the languages of many nations, small numbers are still associated with material objects, for example, the number “two” in Tibetan sounds the same as the word “wings”.
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Having learned to count, even to a certain extent, people began to think about writing numbers and numbers. Initially, these were just nodules, nicks, painted sticks. Of course, such a recording system was extremely inconvenient, because in order to indicate 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 in the next category. For example, in the decimal system, ten units are indicated by a single digit, but offset by one digit.
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The first such system was invented in Ancient Babylon, but the number 60 was used as the basis, which was rather inconvenient. A modern decimal system appeared in India around the VI century A.D. It came to Europe thanks to the Arabs, so the numbers that are familiar to everyone are still called Arabic, as opposed to the Roman numbers that were used during the times of Ancient Rome in Europe. The Arabic decimal number system greatly facilitated the basic mathematical operations, which allowed science to step forward.
