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Wouldn't it be kinda weird if they couldn't?
It’s more that other animals presumably can’t do math, but we can, and so there must have been a time when we couldn’t either. So determining when and how that ability developed in humans is an important topic of our history to research.
Last I heard it had been demonstrated that some could think through basic problems, and plenty of animals have demonstrated the same approximate number system that human youth (and many adults still) display.
Oh animals absolutely do have some basic number sense, but it’s a very niche research topic that not many people know about, so the presumption is that animals can’t do math, there is something special that happened cognitively for humans, and social science has the task of charting our development. It’s a bit of a misguided attitude, but it is common.
This is not correct. Numerosity is not just quantitative comparisons, virtually all animals with brains can do the latter. Numerosity is integers in neuroanatomy, it's a metaphorical concept separate from perceiving an amount of things in front of you, and different from being able to tell that there's more or less of a thing in your hand compared to another individual's hand. We have no reason to believe that a chimp can look at four figs and engage "four" as a separate concept from "figs".
If something could count different things and assemblies of multiple things, would that work as proof?
Because if so there actually is evidence for it in various unrelated taxa including parrots
It's a little clumsy to be looking around animalia and trying to force numerosity, which so far is a definitively human behavior we have defined and studied in ourselves, onto non-human behavior. It could be the case that avians have some other way they handle this environmental problem because being able to perceive relative quantities is of course vital to survival.
In humans, numerosity is probably some kind of spandrel of our metaphorical way of thinking, unrelated initially to the effect on fitness of being able to notice that a big bundle of figs is better than one fig, or that one leopard is worse than zero leopards. Similar to how you can invoke the thought of a morality-enforcing old man in the sky even when such a man does not actually exist, you can invoke the concept of three even when you aren't dealing with three of some item. I don't think a bird counting objects which aren't in some category we can define really mirrors this, and I don't think numerosity is some isolated module in neuroanatomy that we can seek out in other animals, I think it's an integral part of the whole human cognitive phenotype just like language or symbolism.
So you’re talking about human use of set theory. Got it.
I mean not really, set theory is higher level abstract mathematics and what we're discussing is performed without any training or direction by every normally developed human child. But the fact that set theory exists, as a concept that humans share with each other and attempt to refine via formal mathematics is, I think, a great example of the astonishing valley between how we deal with quantitative logic versus any other animal.
That seems like quite a presumption given that the current state of physics is that everything works off of math.
But even if there was a time when humans couldn't do math, I doubt it was after Gobekli Tepe.
I would guess you would have to go at least a couple of million years back before people were aware of concepts like symmetry or dividing something into two roughly equal parts.
It was relatively recent that the concept of “zero” as a specific number with unique properties developed. Prior to that it was seen as a sort of fuzzy default state but not a number as such. Negative numbers and zero played a huge role in our ability to develop abstract (e.g. multidimensional and other) mathematics. Math is a cool weird concept that in many ways stretches the limits of the human brain. We are the universe attempting to understand itself.
Yeah but these sherds are only 8,000 years old, firmly in the Neolithic in the Levant
Humans had already exhibited signs of advanced abstract thinking for a long time before that. I would expect that the point when humans got the ability to do more advanced/abstract maths was firmly in the paleolithic.
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Counting =/= math or number sense (for example, this article discusses the difference between math and counting systems). Every culture has some kind of basic math. They have to for basic survival at least. Counting systems can vary greatly from language to language. I can think of how in Khmer the numbers are both base-5 and base-10 and alternate in the middle digits. This would make it appear that only 1-5 is represented in Khmer. But that isn’t actually true.
And even in a society where every digit isn’t named, there are situations where a math conceptualization will come up, and obviously those situations can be dealt with (tally marks and such).
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I'm not convinced that not having a name for the number 5 means that people don't know how to count to five. We don't have a word for 25 – we just combine the words twenty, which really just means two tens, and five. I would think that having unique names for the first ten numbers is just because our counting system is base 10, not because our language is more proper than any other.
But in any event, the kind of math they are talking about is dividing a field into two roughly equal portions, something that I am pretty sure dogs can do.