Correspondence Counting

By one way of thinking, our prehistoric ancestors were just as smart as we are. They had the same brain structure as today’s humans, capable of solving problems with the same complexity as today’s best thinkers.

That is, they would be capable of solving any problems they could understand. They were equipped with the same hardware, giving them an innate ability to reason and solve problems.

It’s today’s software that’s so different.

Hundreds of thousands of years of modern human existence has provided us with a system for passing down knowledge from one generation to the next.

Prehistoric people certainly learned from their parents and the people they were around every day. Knowledge of all sorts of things human beings aren’t born knowing was passed down through generations, like whether a certain type of plant was poisonous or the best way to kill a mammoth.

Over time, more and more knowledge was passed down. The more likely the knowledge was to be useful to a large number of people, the more likely it was to continue to be passed down. This is how abstract knowledge came to become foundational to today’s “software”—abstract concepts can be applied anywhere, so you don’t have to solve a new problem every time. Instead, you just follow the recipe.

One of the very earliest of these sorts of slow “software” upgrades is a concept we take for granted today, but it’s not something that was always around. It’s the idea that a spoken word or a written mark can represent an actual number of things.

This concept is called correspondence counting, and it is one of our very best inventions.

Even before learning their ABCs, kids learn how to count things. Infants under six months can grasp the difference between one and two things.

Maybe that’s why it’s so easy to take correspondence counting for granted. It seems so obvious! And yet, this concept had to be invented, and the knowledge passed down.

Imagine the moment when early humans first grasped that a single sound or symbol could represent a specific quantity. This invention wasn't just about counting objects; it was the genesis of abstract thought, a precursor to complex language, mathematics, and eventually, advanced technology.

Someone had the idea of making a sound to go with each number, and then to memorize that sequence. Brilliant!

Someone else had the idea to mark each of these numbers down, creating what we now call tally marks.

The ability to abstractly represent the world around us was a cornerstone in the building of civilizations, laying the groundwork for every scientific and mathematical discovery that followed. By inventing correspondence counting, our ancestors took a monumental step from observing their environment to actively and abstractly engaging with it, setting humanity on a path to unparalleled progress.