great thread 777 - very, very interesting. I read this (below) today in wikipedia - there seems to be a lot going on in the numbers.
Early mathematics
The Ishango bone, dating to perhaps 18000 to 20000 B.C.
Long before the earliest written records, there are drawings that indicate some knowledge of elementary mathematics and of time measurement based on the stars. For example, paleontologists have discovered ochre rocks in a South African cave that were about 70,000 years old, adorned with scratched geometric patterns.[2] Also prehistoric artifacts discovered in Africa and France, dated between 35,000 and 20,000 years old,[3] suggest early attempts to quantify time.[4]
There is evidence that women devised counting to keep track of their menstrual cycles; 28 to 30 scratches on bone or stone, followed by a distinctive marker. Moreover, hunters and herders employed the concepts of one, two, and many, as well as the idea of none or zero, when considering herds of animals.[5][6]
The Ishango bone, found near the headwaters of the Nile river (northeastern Congo), may be as much as 20,000 years old. One common interpretation is that the bone is the earliest known demonstration[7] of sequences of prime numbers and of Ancient Egyptian multiplication. Predynastic Egyptians of the 5th millennium BC pictorially represented geometric spatial designs. It has been claimed that megalithic monuments in England and Scotland, dating from the 3rd millennium BC, incorporate geometric ideas such as circles, ellipses, and Pythagorean triples in their design.[8]
The earliest known mathematics in ancient India dates from 3000–2600 BC in the Indus Valley Civilization (Harappan civilization) of North India and Pakistan. This civilization developed a system of uniform weights and measures that used the decimal system, a surprisingly advanced brick technology which utilized ratios, streets laid out in perfect right angles, and a number of geometrical shapes and designs, including cuboids, barrels, cones, cylinders, and drawings of concentric and intersecting circles and triangles. Mathematical instruments included an accurate decimal ruler with small and precise subdivisions, a shell instrument that served as a compass to measure angles on plane surfaces or in horizon in multiples of 40–360 degrees, a shell instrument used to measure 8–12 whole sections of the horizon and sky, and an instrument for measuring the positions of stars for navigational purposes. The Indus script has not yet been deciphered; hence very little is known about the written forms of Harappan mathematics. Archeological evidence has led some to suspect that this civilization used a base 8 numeral system and had a value of π, the ratio of the length of the circumference of the circle to its diameter.[9]
The earliest extant Chinese mathematics dates from the Shang Dynasty (1600–1046 BC), and consists of numbers scratched on a tortoise shell [1] [2]. These numbers were represented by means of a decimal notation. For example, the number 123 is written (from top to bottom) as the symbol for 1 followed by the symbol for 100, then the symbol for 2 followed by the symbol for 10, then the symbol for 3. This was the most advanced number system in the world at the time, and allowed calculations to be carried out on the suan pan or (Chinese abacus). The date of the invention of the suan pan is not certain, but the earliest written mention dates from AD 190, in Xu Yue's Supplementary Notes on the Art of Figures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mathematics