There's a guy in Australia who made some "history" book called the "Dark Emu’ that pushes the idea that Aboriginal Australians were not just hunter gatherers and that they had settlements , agriculture, aquaculture and food storage. His own self proclaimed motivation for writing this fake history is to "rebut the colonial myths that have worked to justify dispossession"
Just to give you an idea of how ridiculous this claim is that the Aboriginals had these type of advanced settlements. The Australian government once had to release a PSA video telling the Aboriginals not to sleep on the road or they might get run over by cars. Does this sound like the kind of people that would have had agriculture, aquaculture and food storage?
As you can expect though, this book got a lot of awards and gets promoted in libraries and schools
IIRC the ""Ethiopian Multiplication"" procedure was originally religion based, but it turns out the reason it works is because it uses a series of base-2 number sets to do large-scale multiplication quickly. It seems to have been a technique that occurred as the result of merchants having to make large commodity calculations quickly.
This process does appear to have at least originated in Egypt, but was apparently stumbled upon in many other places. It's much older than the modern "carry the term" long-multiplication and long-division methods we currently use.
True, but there's also a major benefit of us being able to identify them over time. Plenty of low-artifact cultures are totally lost to us, even dominant ones. All those institutions are super useful and leave a strong mark for us to reference them.
That's kinda why I love the moon landing. That some-bitch is gonna be up there for 100 million years completely undisturbed.
I was speaking of the Pirahã of the Amazon who have one, two and many as their numerical basis.
There's no significance above three in any form for them and trying to make it so just implies that you need to make it so.
It's long been a thing that both Inuit and researchers think that wolves can actually count up to 7.
Which makes sense to me - you want to be able to count your (little) kids. (say, the equivalent of under 5, that really need watching.)
Canines have up to 8 kids per litter, usually 6, so counting to 7 would be adequate.
Humans only have to worry about 2 or maybe 3 little kids at a time.
I don't think that's it. It's pretty standard prior to the modern era for families to have around 5 kids or more.
Childless couples basically didn't exist and the whole 2.3 kids was a small family.
I think they're saying that by the time you're having your fourth kid, your first one is old enough to not need constant supervision.
What Grumman said. Over fives will be off mingling with the other kids of the tribe. You only have to keep track of newborn-toddler-"preschooler".
So, what do they do, do they just count in sets of pairs like a base-3 numbering system?... Actually, they probably don't have "zero", so is it a base-2 numbering system that starts with 1? Would they regard "Five" as: "A set comprised of a pair of pairs and one"
It's kind of the point that how they regard things is how they regard things and how we regard them regarding things is how we regard how they regard things.
It's sort of like respecting their pronouns but its not all made up for criminals to take advantage of.
Until it gets shotgunned by a meteor shower.
Eh. It'll still be more preserved than most of the shit we have to dig up.