How did Neanderthals and other ancient humans learn to count?

Nicely written article.

I would guess that using numbers started around the same time that trade (bartering) started.

> Peter Watson dates the history of long-distance commerce from circa 150,000 years ago.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade#Prehistory

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:

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/05/how-inevitable-i...

Well then, the number line is the conceptual descendant of that tally bone ? ;)