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Practice combining sentences as you learn about the history of 1, 2, 3!
Human Origins Program, NMNH, Smithsonian Institution
1. Numbers are used for counting and measuring things. You can find them everywhere. Do you know their history? It’s fascinating!
2. The first kind of written number was likely a tally mark. Ancient humans counted by carving tallies into cave walls and stones. They carved them into bones. Check out the tallies on this animal bone!
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3. Eventually, people started using a tool with movable beads called an abacus. They could count things and add and subtract numbers with it. It’s like a calculator. It doesn’t need any batteries!
4. Ancient Egyptians used drawings called hieroglyphics [hye-ruh-GLIH-fiks] to write things, including numbers. A rope represented the number 100. A lotus plant meant 1,000.
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5. Later, the ancient Romans used a system called Roman numerals. Its numbers were letters. We sometimes still use Roman numerals! You might see ads for Super Bowl 56. They might say Super Bowl LVI.
6. Arab and Indian mathematicians made the numbers we use today. They’re called the Hindu-Arabic numerals. You probably know them as 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9!
7. Many were suspicious of the new numbers at first. One Italian city even banned using the number zero in 1298! People worried the numbers could be easily changed. Today, Hindu-Arabic numerals are used around the world.
8. Computers depend on numbers to work. Modern life wouldn’t be possible without them. Just think about the technology you use all the time. You can count on the fact that you’ll use numbers every day!
This article was originally published in the February 2022 issue.
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