Perhaps this entry should have preceded the prior one, but hey, I am not an expert on communicating this kind of information — yet!
In any case, to build a society, ya gotta be able to count things. Setting aside the quantification of so many things, it appears that the most fundamental need for numbers in ancient history relates to menstruation. Indeed, the oldest such evidence is the “Lebombo bone” dating back 42,000 years. Named for the mountains in which it was found, the Lebombo bone was made from a baboon fibula (ouch!), and it has 29 notches, corresponding both to the duration of the moon phases and a menstrual cycle.
As an aside, isn’t it strange that human women have menstrual cycles as long as a moon cycle?? Surely that’s not coincidental. …right?
Anyway, the bone with 29 notches is not without controversy. Only a portion of the bone was recovered, so it’s fully possible that the 29 notches are merely a portion. It is fully possible the notches are simply a grip pattern.
The Ishango bone from ~25,000 years ago is an artifact with markings on it that could symbolize numbers. To me, this one seems dicey: on one hand, the marks represent fairly sophisticated math (prime numbers), yet the Wikipedia page says, “the third row contains amounts that might be halves and doubles, though these are inconsistent.” Me, I’m skeptical. Other skeptics think the engravings could be for a utilitarian purpose, rather than grip.
Early number systems were quite rudimentary. The concept of zero didn’t even exist before the seventh century(!).
So where do numbers begin? I see on Wikipedia: “The earliest known unambiguous notations for numbers emerged in Mesopotamia about 5000 or 6000 years ago.” However, I am not finding other info about that. The next text is about the first accounting relics found in what is now Syria, which date to ~10000 BCE.
If you ask me, the real headline here is that the earliest evidence of numbers is also early evidence of accounting.