Nicely written article.<p>I would guess that using numbers started around the same time that trade (bartering) started.<p>> Peter Watson dates the history of long-distance commerce from circa 150,000 years ago.[0]<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade#Prehistory" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade#Prehistory</a>
That means they used to think with metaphors, i.e. a hunted animal is a mark in this bone. Also that bone is an information storage tool. In order to let others retrieve this data from the storage they first needed a language to share the metaphor.
This blog post from Stephen Wolfram which was featured on HN a few days ago seems relevant:<p><a href="https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/05/how-inevitable-is-the-concept-of-numbers/" rel="nofollow">https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/05/how-inevitable-i...</a>