Origin of mathematics

The Cro-Magnon people arrived in Europe around 40,000 BC. By 30,000 BC, they had colonized the entire globe, a tremendous accomplishment requiring sailing technology and celestial navigation.

The first recognizable models were numbers; counting and ‘writing’ numbers is documented since 30,000 BC. These people developed a system of mathematics adequate to determine the cycle of phase of the moon, engraving a primitive graph of this cycle in a bone.

They devise a method of counting. Mathematics was born when ancient man learned how to count.

Archeologists have found a bone with tick marks carved into it. The ticks are arranged into 11 groups of five, suggesting that the bone is used as a tally. One of the artifacts is a wolf bone with many straight notches cut into it.

Between 10000 and 8000 BC in Mesopotamia, people used sets of pebbles as modeling sets.

It is well known that by 2000 BC at least three cultures (Babylon, Egypt, India) had a decent knowledge of mathematics and used mathematical model to improve their every-day life.
Origin of mathematics

History and Prehistory Humankind

History and Prehistory Humankind
Scholars customarily draw a a sharp distinction between prehistory and history. Prehistory is taken to be the long era from biological beginnings of humankind over 2 million years ago to the origins of civilization about 5,000 years ago in the first urban centers of the Near East.

The transition to civilization and the advent of written records traditionally mark the commencement of history proper.

Prehistory, because of the exclusively material nature of its artifacts, mainly in the from of stone, bone or certain products has inescapably become the province of the archeologist, while the historical era, with its documentary records, is the domain of the history.

However the single label “prehistory” obscures two distinctly different substages: the Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, which held sway for around 2 million years, is marked by rudimentary stone tools, designed for collecting and processing wild food sources, while the succeeding Neolithic, or New Stone Age, which first took hold in the Near East around 12,000 years ago, entailed substantially more complex stone implements adapted to the requirements of an economy of low intensity food production in the form of gardening or herding.

The technologies of both the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras have left a rich legacy of material artifacts. In constant, only a feeble record exists of any scientific interest in these preliterate societies, mainly in the form of astronomically oriented structures. Thus, at the very outset, the evidence indicates that science and technology followed separate trajectories during 2,000 millennia of prehistory.

Technology of the crafts – formed an essential element of both the nomadic food-collecting economy of Paleolithic societies and the food–producing activities in Neolithic villages, while science , as an abstract and systematic interest in nature was essentially nonexistent, or at any rate, has left little trace.
History and Prehistory Humankind