Who made up counting??

Question

how did anyboy think of how to do numbers... or letters or any of that stuff?

Answer 1

There was no "inventor" of counting.  Different cultures came up with their own systems, largely independently of each other.  

Counting is really just matching up a list of items in 1-to-1 correspondence with a sequence of numerals.  You call the first item "1", the second item "2" and so on until you run out of items.  The simplest way to do this is to just match it up with a certain amount of fingers.  When people ran out of fingers, they either used things like stones in a bag, or made little marks or lines, like tally marks.  There have been bones found from about 20,000 BCE with man-made marks like that:

http://www.simonsingh.net/The_Ishango_Bo...

The letters in our alphabet (which is basically the Roman alphabet) comes from older alphabets, which traces back to hieroglyphic systems where little whole pictures each represented objects or ideas.

Answer 2

hit the books harder!

Answer 3

Adam and Eve made up counting, they must of had some way to keep track of how many apples they had.

Answer 4

The first human.

How clever does one need to be to look at two pieces of food and figure that's better than just one piece, and that was better than none? Or look at two enemies and wish he had a friend? No -- 2 friends would be even better...