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0 pointsbencollier495y ago0 comments

I think the idea of the 100,000 years of memory is plausible, but I think it's likely to persist because the number seven seems to be universally important to humans.

People could potentially have superimposed the number seven on the story, as per the rainbow's seven colours and Newton.

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7 comments · 2 top-level

gostsamo5y ago· 4 in thread

Since when is 7 important though? The species didn't have much of a math up until 5000-10000 years ago.

chmod7755y ago

I'm going to go out on a limb here and claim that humans have been able to count since before you'd consider them human.

Lots of animals are able to count and it's ridiculous to assume that any individual with even a rudimentary language wouldn't be able to.

With which I mean to say that you don't need a formal understanding of 'mathematics' to count.

Further there's nothing mathematically super special about the number 7. You might say "it's a prime, and also X, Y, Z", but there's pretty much an infinite number of properties you could find for any number you choose.

Keysh5y ago

There are, even today, languages that lack words for numbers higher than 2, 3, or 4 -- including a number of Australian languages. This tends to be more true for languages of contemporary hunter-gatherer. (See, e.g., Caleb Everett's Numbers and the Making of Us: Counting and the Course of Human Culture and references therein, or this article: https://theconversation.com/anumeric-people-what-happens-whe...). Studies of people who are native speakers of such languages actually do have difficulties keeping precise track of different numbers of items, at least at the level of five or more.

(There are Australian languages with more extensive number words, which is probably where the examples of "Pleiades = 7 women" stories come from.)

josefx5y ago

That is an interesting claim, the wikipedia articles about the history of math claim that the earliest written examples are from 3000 BCE. Finding a written record older is rather unlikely since that corresponds roughly to the oldest written texts in general. We do however have evidence of tally marks that date back to 35000 BCE[1] with one use possibly being a lunar calendar.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_marks

SSLy5y ago

>Since when is 7 important though?

Since one moon phase takes that long.

jjk1665y ago· 1 in thread

7 is an important number across many cultures which pops up again and again. So is 8 (Eightfold path, 8 days of Hanukka, 8 Beatitudes, 8 Gates of Heaven). So is 6 (6-pointed Star of David, 6 Days of creation, 6 Articles of Belief, 6 Ministries, 666). So is 5. So is 9... There are many more things to be counted than there are numbers to count them with. Saying everyone decided on 7 stars because they just all liked the number 7 doesn't pass the sniff test.

astrange5y ago

Isn't this the strong law of small numbers? They're likely to be reused often because they're so small.

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