How Humans Learned To Count

When people say, "learned to count," it implies that once upon a time people didn't know how to count at all. However, research has shown that this is not the case.

Let's start... with a plant! Yes, yes, with the plant venus flytrap, which eats grasshoppers, and also ants, caterpillars, and of course, flies. The leaves of the Venus flytrap are real traps with sharp teeth on the edges. When the plant hunts, it opens wide its brightly colored leaves from the inside - as if, "Come, cockroaches, I'll treat you to tea (in the sense of nectar)...". Only woe to the fly that decides to come to the flycatcher "for tea". The trap leaf slams shut very quickly, and the insect is trapped in a death trap. Next, the leaf secretes digestive juice, dissolves the prey, and drinks it dry. When the flytrap leaf opens again, only a chitinous skin remains of the insect.....

But how does a flycatcher detect that prey has landed on a leaf? At first, the answer seemed obvious: the flycatcher has many sensitive hairs on the inner surface of the leaf. The grasshopper touched a hair - and the hair as if sends a signal to the flycatcher: "Grab! ". But ... more careful observation showed a very strange thing: sensitive hairs flycatcher absolutely do not react to extraneous objects. For example, to an accidentally fallen branch. Or a piece of trash. Or even a raindrop! It's as if the flycatcher has eyes and can see exactly what is trapped.

What have biologists discovered? Experiments showed that the venus flytrap has no eyes, but it... can count! A speck of grass falls on a hair of the flycatcher's leaf - SIZE. The flycatcher waits, nothing happens? No. Then we stay calm, keep hunting, false alarm. But then the very same grasshopper jumps on the leaf. It touched one hair, another hair, another hair, another hair, another hair, another hair - slam! The trap slams shut. But that's not all - what if there was a mistake? And the flycatcher is waiting again: the trapped grasshopper starts pounding, beating, trying to escape from the trap, again touches the hairs - FOUR and FIVE. At the fifth touch, the plant is finally convinced that there is dinner in the trap! Only then does it release its digestive juices.

And then biologists thought: if even some plants can count to five, what about animals? After all, the behavior of animals is much more complex than that of plants...

The first results were not long in coming. It turned out that chimpanzee monkeys not only know how to count, but even solve simple addition problems! The monkeys were offered a choice of two pairs of plates with candy (you could choose one pair), and the number of candies in each plate was different. So - the chimpanzees almost without error (9 correct answers out of 10) chose the pair of plates on which the sum of candies was greater!

And that's not all. It turned out that wolves and lions are also very good at counting. When the territory of one wolf pack was invaded by another, the wolves, listening carefully to the "voices" of strangers, could unmistakably determine how many wolves in the alien pack, more or less. If less, the wolves attacked the aliens. If there were more aliens, the pack ceded territory to them without a fight.

Exactly the same behavior was exhibited by lion prides - the lions counted the voices of strangers, compared the number of "how many of us" and "how many of them", and drew exactly the right conclusions.

But wolves, monkeys and lions are still higher animals. What about insects?

Once again, the results of the experiments puzzled scientists: it turned out that ordinary bees can count to four!

How did they find that out? With the help of an experiment: bees were put into a maze with two rooms. In one room there was a bowl with honey, the second room was empty. The researchers marked the paths to different rooms with sequences of large and colorful geometric figures: triangle, circle, square.... It turned out that when such marks on the correct path was one, two, three or four, the bees unmistakably remembered the correct path. But if there were more marks on each path, the bees made mistakes and flew to an empty room as often as to a room with honey ... So bees can count!

But nobody teaches them that! So, animals get their counting skills just "by nature"?

How does it happen? On this topic, scientists express a variety of hypotheses - but a single and one hundred percent correct solution has not yet been found. One of the most widespread hypotheses says that numbers in animals and humans arise in the process of nervous activity in the brain as if "automatically". See id.

The very first (and most important!) natural number is "one". What is "one"? Imagine: a summer afternoon, an apiary, beehives, a lot of bees buzzing over a meadow with flowers, collecting nectar. And to the side, on the branch of a tree, lurks in ambush predator - wasp-philanthus, which beekeepers call "bee wolf". While the bees are flying in swarms, while there are "many" of them, they are dangerous! Philanthus waits patiently, sitting still and watching. But now one of the bees carelessly flies away from her friends, leaving her "alone"! Philanthus sees this ONE bee and instantly rushes at it!

Do you realize how important it is for a hunter to understand the difference between "one" and "many"? If the philanthropist didn't understand this, he would have just stuck his head into the thick of the bees, and they would have swarmed all over him with cries of "our bees are being beaten!", and it would have ended with a very sad ending for the philanthropist.

The second natural number is the number "two". In an anthill, a hungry ant begs for a drop of food from a well-fed colleague - this is the relationship "me and you", "me and partner". In the same way wasps and bees exchange food. The number "two" is mother and cub. And, of course, do not forget that a person has two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears - these discoveries the baby also realizes and "takes note".

Finally, the number "three" also gradually appears in the brain of a living being. The number "three" is a window to the outside world, it is "me, you and someone else". For example, "me, my prey and an enemy who wants to take that prey away from me". Or "me, the predator who preys on me, and the life-saving burrow".

For most animals, the numbers "five" and "six" are already "too much". Here (with few exceptions) only humans can cope. Experiments show that the larger the number, the more difficult it is for animals to work with it, and at some point all large numbers turn into an indefinite "many".

The dog distinguishes well between two beats of the wall clock ("it's time for lunch!") and seven beats of the clock ("it's time for a walk!"), but it can't distinguish nine hours from ten.

A monkey can tell the difference between twenty candies and sixty candies (i.e. it understands that one "many" can be bigger than another "many"). But a monkey cannot distinguish between twenty-two candies and twenty-three candies.

There is another important difference between humans and animals - in the way they perceive numbers. Experiments have shown that animals (and primitive humans!) are not able to think abstractly and abstractly about numbers. A cat perfectly distinguishes one mouse from two mice - but it does not understand the existence of the number two itself.

Scientists who have studied the life of human tribes living a natural way of life have been very surprised by this fact: these people were often able to count, but they could only count objects, and only the same objects! Such a person could count only "one nut, two nuts..." or "one boat, two boats...", but he could not count "one, two"! But these savages were not stupid. They just hadn't developed abstract thinking yet.

People learned abstract thinking not so long ago - about five or six thousand years ago. "How do you count how many ten chickens and five chickens there will be?" - a teacher sternly asked a student at school in ancient Egypt. The student would count out ten sticks, then five more sticks, count the sticks together - and proudly answer, "There will be fifteen chickens!". He counted sticks, and answered "in chickens" - and this was the greatest discovery of ancient mathematics.