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
The weirdest part of this is that nobody seems to see how this is through the "Colonialist lens" (To use their own terms).
Being built with settlements , agriculture, aquaculture and food storage doesn't make a culture the only way to be. Thinking that way only shows that the person thinking this is thinking that it's the only way to be.
Soon they'll be saying that a well known rural tribe in Amazonian Brazil could count above three, but they were using a complex mathematical system in order to do so.
The worst of the racists are those who have to turn whoever they meet into something of who they think they are. And that's just removing all of their own identity and heritage and painting over it with what you think is yours (Which is also false).
But historians have always been terrible at chronicling history without adding victors' bias. It's even accommodated in their first year anthropologist studies as acceptable error.
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.