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From the Vault: Where do numbers come from?

Stuff To Blow Your Mind

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What if the Numbers Are Relationships?

The shango bone has a list of primes between ten and 20. It could have been used in some sort of ritualistic, musical recitation. There is another hypothesis about the historical origins of number systems. This one comes from a researcher named caronlee overman. She says not every culture or language group has a system of exact numbers for arbitrarily high quantities.

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