When did people learn to swim? Start in science. Accounting science in different countries

When and how did the person speak? According to some scientists, this happened 50 thousand years ago, others call the figure millions of years.

Biblical view

The Old Testament story says that man was created intelligent and with the God-given ability to speak. God brought animals to man "to see what he would call them, and to know what he would call every living soul."

But the first word spoken by Adam, according to Dante Alighieri, was the Hebrew word "El" - God. From Adam, Eve and their children spoke Hebrew: this language remained the only one until the “Babylonian pandemonium”.

Imitating nature

The 18th-century German historian Johann Gottfried Herder seriously shook the “divine theory” of the origin of language, which at that time was believed by the majority. The scientist argued that speech began to form at the moment when a person began to imitate the sounds of animals.

Herder's theory was ridiculed by contemporaries, calling it the "av-av thesis".

Linguist Alexander Verzhbovsky returned to Herder's hypothesis, putting forward his theory of "two-consonant first signals of onomatopoeic origin." According to the scientist, to convey the sounds of the frightening forces of nature, for example, thunder, our ancestors used the sound combinations "Gan" and "Ran", and the signals "Al" or "Ar" were shouted out when they drove the beast into a trapping pit.

The origins of the rudiments of speech, according to Verzhbovsky, should be sought in one or more habitats of the "humanized primate", from where speech was carried to all corners of the Earth. This "humanized primate", according to Verzhbovsky, was a Cro-Magnon man who inhabited Europe 40 thousand years ago.

"Brock Center"

Homo habilis, who supposedly lived 2.5 million years ago, is often called the first representative of the genus Homo. He possessed a number of features that distinguish him from the animal kingdom: this is not only the ability to make tools and primitive clothing, but also the structure of the brain.

According to anthropologist Stanislav Drobyshevsky, the brain of Homo habilis is characterized by an increase in the development of areas that are responsible for speech.

In particular, a noticeable bulge inside the thin-walled skull indicates that it has a "Broca's center": it is he who provides the motor organization of speech and control of the brain regions that coordinate the speech apparatus.

Specialists-physiologists have restored the morphology of the upper part of the Homo habilis speech apparatus based on traces of muscle attachment on the skull. The human ancestor probably had a massive tongue and lips that did not touch each other: this could allow the hominid to pronounce sounds phonetically similar to our vowels "i", "a", "y" and the consonants "s" and "t".

From gestures to speech

American neuroscientists, comparing the structure of the brain of humans and monkeys, in particular, chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas, noticed a very significant similarity. It turned out that the so-called "Brodman area 44", which is located in the "Brock's center", both in humans and monkeys in the left hemisphere of the brain is larger than in the right.

In humans, this area is responsible for speech, but why do monkeys need such a developed organ?

The researchers hypothesized that "Broadman area 44" in monkeys is responsible for sign language. This suggests that human speech could have developed from the gestures that our ancestors used to communicate.

Scientists from the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disabilities (USA) confirmed these conjectures: they found out that the same parts of the brain are responsible for verbal and non-verbal means of human communication.

Linguist Philip Lieberman of the University of Connecticut drew attention to the importance of the pharynx in pronouncing the vowels "a", "i", "u", which form the basis of many modern languages. Combining with consonants, these vowels are able to create multiple combinations, but, most importantly, instantly link encoded series of sounds into intelligible speech.

Together with Yale University anatomist Edmund Krelin, Lieberman decided to test to what extent ancient man was able to pronounce the mentioned sounds.

Based on fossils, scientists reconstructed the Neanderthal vocal apparatus and found that his larynx was noticeably higher than its position in modern humans.

Then the researchers in plasticine recreated the pharyngeal, nasal and oral cavities of an ancient person. After taking measurements, they compared them with the size of the vocal apparatus of a modern person. Further, having put the obtained figures into an electronic computer, they determined the resonances and the range of sounds produced.

The conclusion was this: our ancestors, who lived 60 thousand years ago, could not pronounce the main vowels in rapid combinations. According to scientists, the speech of ancient people was much more primitive, while they spoke about 10 times slower than a modern person.

innate function

A prominent American linguist, Noam Chomsky, put forward a bold hypothesis. In his opinion, human speech is not the result of learning - it is a genetically built-in mechanism, like hearing or vision.

He sees confirmation of his theory in the fact that infants instantly and consciously extract information relevant to speech from the surrounding noise.

Experiments in the field of genetics make Chomsky's theory quite viable. Thus, the study of human mitochondrial DNA showed that in order to reach the modern level, speech should have arisen as a result of a genetic mutation 200 thousand years ago - this, as you know, is the time of "mitochondrial Eve".

However, Cholmsky believes that the whole point is the evolutionary breakthrough of language, which occurred about 50 thousand years ago, when our ancestors left Africa. The linguist sees the reasons for the “language surge” in the appearance of more complex social institutions, creative activity, tracking natural phenomena and other factors in the development of human society.

Cooperative activity

Some experts are convinced that Homo erectus must have had some form of language, since a significant part of its activities required the exchange of thoughts. The fossil drawings of Torralba and Ambrona already indicate high organization primitive man hunting process.

The American writer Edmund White is sure: in order to draw up preliminary plans for hunting, name animals, tools, indicate landmarks primitive should have talked. And as intra-family and public relations expanded and lexicon our ancestor.

White's hypothesis can be confirmed by studies of human remains from the Totavel cave (France), which are supposedly 450 thousand years old. Scientists attribute them to a group of hominids, which are an intermediate species between Pithecanthropus and Neanderthals.

With the help of a computer, experts recreated the passage of sound from the lungs to the tip of the lips of the “Totavel man”. The machine gave the result in the form of sounds "aah-aah", "chen-chen", "reu-reu". For an ancient hunter, this is a very good result.

How old are you? How many friends do you have? How many paws does a cat have? To calculate everything, you need to know the numbers. And how did the ancient people who did not know them think? Here meet.

Long ago, many thousands of years ago, our distant ancestors lived in small tribes. They wandered through the fields and forests, along the valleys of rivers and streams, looking for food. They ate leaves, fruits and roots of various plants. Sometimes they fished, collected shells or hunted. They dressed in the skins of dead animals. The life of primitive people was not much different from the life of animals. And the people themselves differed from animals only in that they spoke and knew how to use the simplest tools: a stick, a stone or a stone tied to a stick.

Primitive people, like today's little children, did not know the score. But now children are taught to count by parents and teachers, older brothers and sisters, comrades. A primitive people there was no one to learn from. Life itself was their teacher. That is why the learning progressed slowly.

Observing the surrounding nature, on which his life completely depended, our distant ancestor first learned to isolate individual objects from many different objects. From a pack of wolves - the leader of the pack, from a herd of deer - one deer, from a brood of floating ducks - one bird, from an ear with grains - one grain.

At first they defined this ratio as "one" and "many".

Frequent observations of sets consisting of a pair of objects (eyes, ears, horns, wings, hands) led a person to the concept of number. Our distant ancestor, talking about seeing two ducks, compared them with a pair of eyes. And if he saw more of them, he said: "Many." Only gradually did a person learn to single out three objects, and then four, five, six, etc. Life required learning to count. Getting food, people had to hunt large animals: elk, bear, bison. Our ancestors hunted large groups sometimes the whole tribe. For the hunt to be successful, it was necessary to be able to surround the beast. Usually the elder placed two hunters behind the bear's den, four with spears against the den, three on one side and three on the other side of the den. To do this, he had to be able to count, and since there were no names of numbers then, he showed the number on his fingers. And by the way, his legs played significant role in the history of counting, especially when people began to exchange objects of their labor with each other. So, for example, wanting to exchange a spear made by him with a stone tip for five skins for clothes, a person put his hand on the ground and showed that a skin should be placed against each finger of his hand. One five meant 5, two - 10. When there were not enough arms, legs were also used. Two arms and one leg - 15, two arms and two legs - 20. Traces of counting on the fingers have been preserved in many countries. So, in China and Japan, household items (cups, plates, etc.) are counted not in dozens and half dozens, but in fives and tens. In France and England, counting by twenty is still in use. There were special names for numbers - at first only for one and two. Numbers greater than two were called using addition: 3 is two and one, 4 is two and two, 5 is two, two more and one. The names of numbers - for many peoples indicate; their origin. So, the Indians have two - eyes, the Tibetans - wings, other peoples have one - the moon, five - the hand, etc. Among those peoples who still retain their primitive way of life, such names of numbers are still used. For example, one of the Australian tribes counts as follows: 1 - enea, 2 - petcheval, 3 - petcheval-enea, 4 - petcheval-petcheval. And in another tribe they considered it this way: 1 - small, 2 - bulan, 3 - guliba, 4 - bulan-bulan, 5 - bulan-guliba, 6 - guliba-guliba. And on the banks of the Amazon River, a tribe was discovered that knew only three numbers - 1, 2 and 3, and the number 3 was called "poettarrarorincoaroak". That's how hard it was for people to learn to count! HOW DID PEOPLE LEARN TO WRITE NUMBERS? different countries and in different times it was done differently. Before people knew how to make paper, records appeared in the form of notches on sticks and animal bones, in the form of deposited shells or pebbles, or in the form of knots tied to a belt or rope.

Now we, accustomed to the inscription of numbers, can’t even believe that there was some other system for writing numbers. These “numbers” were very different and sometimes even funny different peoples. Recording numbers in ancient Babylon, it is very similar to modern, only we count in tens, hundreds, thousands, and so on, and the inhabitants of ancient Babylon united units of 60, 3600 (60x60=3600), and if necessary, 60x60x60=216000 and etc. They wrote in ancient Babylon on soft clay tablets with sharp sticks, and then the tablets were fired, and they became hard and durable. During excavations, entire libraries and archives of such tablets were found. It is difficult to depict complex figures with a stick on clay, therefore the Babylonian writing consisted mainly of various combinations of wedges (it is called cuneiform). Units were represented by narrow vertical wedges, and tens by wide horizontal ones, all numbers up to 60 were "collected" from such wedges. When it was necessary to write down a number greater than 60, then the next one was opened discharge --in it was written how many times the number 60 fits in the number being written, and what remained (that is, the remainder of the division by 60) was recorded, as before, in the first digit. Spaces were left between the digits so that the numbers from different digits did not mix. Such a record of numbers is convenient because if we know how to multiply and add the numbers of the first category, then it is very easy to learn how to perform these actions with any numbers - these calculations can be done "in a column", as you are taught at school. True, the Babylonian system was still very cumbersome due to the fact that 60 is a fairly large number, so it was not used anywhere else. But the numbering and calculation system that developed in India around the 6th century AD turned out to be so convenient and successful that it is now used all over the world. Europeans met her in X - XIII centuries through the Arabs, who were the first to appreciate the merits of this way of writing numbers, they assimilated and transferred them to Europe, so the new numbers in Europe began to be called Arabic. This also happened because the simplest counting device, working in the decimal number system, was always at hand - these are his 10 fingers.

The method of writing numbers is called numbering or reckoning. At the beginning, the Indian numerals were only 9: 1,2,3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9. The number 0 appeared much later, most likely around 500 AD. And at first, if it turned out that there were no units in some digit, then a gap was left between adjacent digits. For example, the number 209 was written like this: 2 9. It is clear that it is very easy to make a mistake when counting such gaps. To get rid of these troubles, first, instead of an empty discharge, they began to put a dot, and then a small circle, which gradually turned into the number 0. Here, it turns out, what long story these familiar icons! Much later, the numbers began to be depicted differently. Look at the Roman numeration: I - one, II - two, III - three. There are five fingers on the human hand. In order not to write five sticks, they began to depict a hand. However, the drawing of the hand was made very simple. Instead of drawing the whole hand, it was depicted with a V sign, and this icon began to denote the number 5. Then one was added to five and got six. Like this: six - VI, seven - VII. And how many are written here: VIII? That's right, eight. Well, what's the shortest way to write four? It takes a long time to count four sticks, so one was taken away from five and written like this: IV is five without one. And how to write ten? stands as usual, and the other is turned down - X. Otherwise, ten can be written with two intersecting sticks. If you write one stick next to X on the right - XI, then it will be eleven, and if on the left - IX - nine. Remember the peculiarity of the Roman notation: the smaller number to the right of the larger one is added to it, the one to the left is subtracted. Therefore, the sign VI means 5 + 1, that is, 6, and the sign IV -5-1, that is, 4. Learning to read numbers written in Roman numeration is not difficult, and we advise you to do this without fail. Later, icons appeared to indicate other numbers. So 100 began to be denoted by the letter C (the first letter of the corresponding Latin word- centum), the number 1000 - the letter M (mille - one thousand), the number 500 - the letter D, the letter L - the number 50. When writing arose, many peoples began to use the alphabet to denote numbers. See how the ancient Greeks and Slavs denoted numbers. You see, both numberings are very similar to each other. It's no coincidence, because legendary creators Slavic writing Cyril and Methodius, when they came up with ways to write Slavic texts, used capital (large) letters of the Greek alphabet. Naturally, the numerical values ​​of these letters have been preserved.

In order to distinguish numbers from words, a special icon was placed above the letters depicting numbers: the Greeks - just a dash, and the Slavs - a wave, which was called "titlo". In Slavic numbering, the title was placed only over one letter of the number, and the order of the numbers in the number was the same as in its name. For example, in the name of the number 15 (among the Slavs - "fifty"), first comes the number of units, and then - tens. The value of a digit did not depend on the place it occupied in the notation of the number. When they wanted to write down numbers greater than 1000, they put a symbol in front of the digit - an oblique crossed line, while the value of the digit was multiplied by 1000. Two such symbols written in a row multiplied the value of the digit by a million (the Greeks in such cases put dashes in front of the numbers indicating number of units). Special names were used for very large numbers. For example, at first the number 10,000 was called the word "darkness". The same word meant infinity (that which cannot be counted). In Greek, the number 10,000 was called "myria", and the word "myriad" denoted huge, incalculable quantities. In this sense, this word is still used in Russian, for example, when they want to say how many leaves are in the forest, they say "myriads of leaves." Later, the number 10,000 began to be called the same way as we do now - "ten thousand", and the word "darkness" began to refer to a thousand thousand, that is, a million. The number of "darkness of topics", that is, a million millions, was called "legion", the number "legion of legions" was called "leodr", and "leodr of leodres" was called "raven". In one manuscript, a number was also mentioned, which was called "deck". This number is equal to ten crows, and the author says that "there is no more than this number." But you already know that you can add one to any, arbitrarily large number, and get an even larger number. One should not think that our ancestors were dumber than you and me, this example just shows how slowly and difficultly people accumulated the knowledge that we received from previous generations.

When did man learn to speak? Where did he start? What were his first words? Researchers have been searching for answers to such questions for thousands of years. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, back in ancient Egypt, Pharaoh Psammetich ordered to raise two babies so that they did not hear the human voice and had no idea about the Egyptian language. He hoped that the children would eventually speak the language of their ancient ancestors, which, in his firm opinion, should have been hidden in their memory. And indeed, over time, they began to repeat something like "bekos" - a word that in the language of the Phrygians, an ancient people who lived in Asia Minor, meant "bread." So, declared Psammetichus triumphantly, Phrygian was undoubtedly the first language of all people.

Many centuries later, the Scottish King James IV did the same experiment and announced that his experimental children spoke in quite tolerable Hebrew. Undoubtedly, such a result should have pleased learned theologians because they always claimed that Adam and Eve used this language. But at the end of the 17th century, a certain Swedish patriot came to a different conclusion: he announced to the world that in paradise the Lord spoke Swedish, Adam spoke Danish, and the serpent spoke French.

Little by little, many theories of the origin of oral speech arose. The 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau suggested that one fine day people, until then only mumbling indistinctly, got together and almost overnight created a language for general use. Why they suddenly needed him, if they used to get along just fine without him, and in what way they explained themselves to each other before, Rousseau did not bother to clarify. His contemporary German novelist Johann Gottfried Herder also believed that language was created by people, and not invested in them by God, as most believed at that time. Is it possible, he argued, to ascribe to a divine creator something as illogical and imperfect as language? However, Rousseau's ingenuous recipe did not suit him either. Herder believed that speech arose from the depths of human nature, as a response to the need to speak. Herder did not explain how language took shape, but believed that it arose at the moment when a person began to imitate the sounds that the living creatures around him emitted, and use these sounds as names for the corresponding animals. Following this theory, which its opponents dubbed the “av-av thesis”, many more theories similar to it appeared, which received the same names and were also ridiculed - for example, “whistling and quacking”, “ding-dong”, oh-oh " and even "uh-uh." They all claimed that oral speech arose from exclamations expressing pain, joy, fear, surprise, etc.

Scientists still do not know exactly how language arose, but thanks to Darwin and the idea of ​​​​human evolution, which made it possible to approach the solution of this problem in a different way, they have a fairly complete idea of ​​\u200b\u200bhow a person spoke. And they have good reason to believe that the first creature whose most important means of communication was oral speech was Homo erectus. The study of various animals, and especially the apes and great apes, both in the laboratory and in natural conditions, has made it possible to understand the basis on which language arose, and has shown that there is much more ape in a talkative person than it might seem. To begin with, we must take a closer look at this foundation, because, having understood how communication took place before the appearance of words, we will more easily understand why and how oral speech developed, as well as a fuller appreciation of the huge changes that it brought with it.

The lower animals and insects have very curious ways of communicating. Bees, for example, perform something like a dance on the comb, conveying in this way accurate information about the direction and distance of the food source, as well as what kind of food it is. Dogs and wolves, in addition to barking, howling and growling, also use smells for communication, as well as a system of visual signals, which includes not only facial expressions and body movements, but also the position of the tail.

The complexity of the communication system corresponds to the complexity of the structure of communities, and, apart from humans, it is most complex in other higher primates. However, they rely on voice much less than one might expect to communicate, and big role along with sounds, they play various combinations of gestures, facial expressions and postures. Apparently, this body language is capable of conveying many different shades of meaning, and sounds are often used only to draw attention to other signals. However, in some cases, communication is possible only with the help of sounds. For example, having found ripe fruits, the monkey emits a joyful cry, to which the whole herd runs, or, noticing the danger, it squeals, and everyone else rushes to their heels.

This wordless system of communication meets all the needs of monkeys as animals living in communities. It enables them to keep in constant contact with each other and, more importantly, through it each member of the community can express own feelings and at a glance to understand the intentions of their relatives, and this allows you to avoid conflicts. Many signals are associated with the system of dominance and submission. They help to strengthen the hierarchy within the herd and ensure that each monkey knows his place. So, the male baboon, standing on the lowest rung of the hierarchical ladder, retreats from the aggressive dominant male and exposes his ass to him as a sign of humility and appeasement (of course, except when he intends to fight for the right of primacy). A variety of audio and visual cues help herd members not to get lost when they disperse in search of food or move to a new location. Other signals are associated with mating behavior or help strengthen the bond between mother and calf. A female chimpanzee soothes her frightened baby by lightly touching his fingers with her fingers. "This sign language in chimpanzees is so complex and subtle," says anthropologist Bernard Campbell, "that in its own way it is as developed as ours."

However, no matter how complex the chimpanzee's communication system and how sleep responds to their needs, it is in all respects far from human speech. To begin with, at least with what she expresses, apparently, only emotions. As far as we know, monkeys in natural conditions do not have any signals denoting certain signs of their habitat - they are not able to name specific objects, they are not able to communicate using complex phonetic codes that humans use. In addition, their signals do not reflect the idea of ​​the past or the future. For them, apparently, there is only a concrete, visible present.

This, however, does not mean at all that the sound signals of monkeys never carry a specific meaning. For example, some great apes, when feeding, change the intensity of their calls depending on how pleasant the food they find is. Under normal circumstances, chimpanzees emit grunts, but bananas - the most coveted treat - cause excited barking. Of course, they do not say "banana!", but nevertheless this signal means something more than a simple "feed!". Even more specialized are the vervet's alarms, which are three different ways notifies of the appearance of three different enemies. The vervetka chirps at the sight of a snake, chirps when it notices some land predator, and announces the appearance of birds of prey with a cry of "rrop!" One chirping sound is enough for all the vervets to scatter along the thin branches, where no four-legged predator can follow them, and when they hear "rrop!", they rush headlong from the trees into the dense undergrowth, inaccessible to winged enemies. They are not able to shout: "Watch out, eagle!", but they do not need to. They absolutely do not need to know whether an eagle is diving at them or a hawk, only one thing is important: where the danger threatens from and where to seek refuge.

Humans also have a rich set of non-verbal cues that express emotions. A smile is enough for a person to show friendly intentions. Around the world, clenched fists and teeth, furrowed brows and pursed lips are the surest signs of anger or frustration. The kiss, although it has acquired complex social and erotic associations, still remains primarily a natural expression of affection. (These basic signals belong to a different category than many other gestures, such as nodding and shaking your head, shrugging your shoulders or clapping your hands, which are essentially simplified substitutes for words and have different meanings in different countries.) People even developed at least one involuntary signal that other primates do not have is that they blush and, as a rule, cannot do anything about it, although such a blush clearly signals their state of mind. A strong excitement is often expressed in the fact that a person loses the ability to speak coherently.

But signals of this kind are noticeably less important for humans than for animals, since they occupy only an insignificant place in their communication system. Most of the information needed for social interaction people, is transmitted through oral speech - any monkey, having lost his sight, would be completely helpless, but a blind person is capable of full communication. According to many experts, it is speech that makes a person a person, as evidenced by the fate of a child born deaf. Since he does not hear and cannot repeat words after other people, it is very difficult to teach him to speak, and not being able to speak, he is doomed to primitive and inadequate forms of communication.

The gift of speech provides an extremely efficient and flexible communication system. Its coded series of sounds convey thought ten times faster than any other system of signals - faster than the alphabet of the deaf-mute, cinema, or even other sound signals. Speech raised man to an entirely new level of social organization. This is a tool that allows him to diversify behavior, adapt it to changing conditions, and not obey once and for all set systems of actions, like other primates. Oral speech allows a person to go beyond his own personality: to give names to objects, to think about them, to perceive them in connection with the past or future. And most importantly, speech provides a person with the opportunity to share their thoughts. As Sherwood Washburn and Shirley Stram wrote in an article on human evolution, "It is not so much the thought itself, but the communication of it to others, that is exclusively a human property that makes possible human culture and is the main criterion that distinguishes between man and animal.

It is for this reason that experts are convinced that Homo erectus must have had some form of language - after all, a significant part of his activity required the exchange of thoughts. For example, to organize a hunt such as that depicted in the fossils of Torralba and Ambrona, he needed to make preliminary plans, name animals, plants and tools, indicate landmarks, and also refer to the past and describe the future. Further, the division of labor characteristic of the society of Homo erectus would hardly have been possible if men and women could not exchange information about their duties and could not agree on a meeting place, where some returned from hunting, and others after searching for edible plants. As their society became more complex, there was a need for words to establish relationships within the family and links with neighboring groups.

In addition, speech became a means by which a person acquired and passed on to the next generation a flexible system of skills, and not just innate stereotypes of behavior, thanks to which he was able to influence his environment and adapt to new conditions. This was the beginning of culture. And from that moment in the evolution of man, culture and language, as its means, become necessary factors survival.

Sign language to reinforce spoken language

Communication of information with the help of signs, not words, such as those still used by tribes leading a primitive way of life, may have supplemented the oral speech of Homo erectus, since it, of course, was still far inferior to the complex and fast speech of modern man. In a society whose life is relatively simple, as it was in the time of Homo erectus, signs may well serve to convey a very large amount of essential information.

For example, members of the Sibiller tribe of New Guinea show numbers by counting with fingers and other parts of the body. The South African Bushman, who naturally must keep quiet when stalking game, relies on sign language to tell other hunters which animal he is chasing. The two lower rows of drawings show how, by bending his fingers and hand, he depicts the most characteristic sign of prey. The gesture here completely replaces the word.

While it has long been agreed that this evolutionary divide was largely due to man's ability to use words to convey generalized concepts, until very recently it remained unclear why only man learned to speak, and his closest intelligent relatives among monkeys did not acquire such a skill. After all, the vocal apparatus of the great ape is in many ways similar to the human one - it has lips, a tongue and a larynx (with a glottis and vocal cords). And yet, as numerous experiments have proven, a monkey cannot be taught human speech. One of the first to be fascinated by this idea was Julien Ofray de La Mettrie, an 18th-century French physician and philosopher who believed that apes were intellectually at the level of mentally deficient people and that to instill in them impeccable manners, it was enough to teach them to speak. However, it was only at the beginning of the 20th century that truly scientific attempts were made to develop speech in great apes. One married couple worked with a chimpanzee named Vicki, and after six years of hard work on their part - and the fruitless efforts of a monkey - Vicki somehow learned to say something like "dad", "mum", "up" ("up") and "kap" ("cup").

A relatively recent experiment has yielded far more startling results. A chimpanzee named Washaw learned to understand more than 350 signs of the language of the deaf and dumb by the age of five and correctly use at least 150 of them. He knew how to use them to name objects and express his desires and needs through the names of these objects. The naming of objects implies a certain abstraction of concepts, and in this limited sense, Washhow learned the human type of communication. However, sign language is not speech.

The success of the Washow and the failure of the Wiki have provided a clearer understanding of what is necessary for human speech. Oral speech requires certain physical and mental features that monkeys simply lack. For example, the tongue of an adult is noticeably thicker than that of monkeys, and is bent into the throat at a right angle. In addition, the human larynx is located lower than that of monkeys. As a result, the pharynx - the part of the throat above the larynx - is much larger in humans than in other primates.

The pharynx serves as a common vestibule for the windpipe, leading to the lungs, and for the esophagus, which connects to the stomach. But in addition, the root of the language adjoins it, and it is necessary for the design of oral speech. After all, it is the pharynx that modulates the sounds made by the vocal cords, and gives them a clear form, which the listener perceives as speech. While a person is speaking, the muscles of the walls of the pharynx and the root of the tongue are in constant motion, precisely regulating the volume of the pharynx (its maximum width is at least ten times the minimum). These changes in volume play the same role in the design of sounds as dozens of pipes of an organ, differing in length and diameter, due to which each has its own tone. The importance of the pharynx for speech is proved, for example, by the fact that a person is able to speak more or less intelligibly without the larynx and tongue (that part of the soft palate that we show when the doctor asks us to say "aaaa"), the pharynx would be intact and the root of the language.

Monkeys, devoid of mental and vocal features of a person, making sounds, change only the volume of the mouth, and the pharynx - or rather, its rudiment - remains practically motionless. As a result, they can articulate only a limited number of distinct signal sounds - the vast majority between 10 and 15 - and are unable to combine them into words at will. ( Largest number sounds - twenty-five - are in the repertoire of the Japanese macaque, the most "vociferous" of the monkeys, both lower and anthropoid.)

Newborn babies, in fact, are not able to articulate the vowel sounds typical of modern human speech, for the same reason. For the first month and a half, the tongue of a screaming baby remains motionless. It fits almost entirely in the mouth, like in monkeys, and the larynx is much higher than in adults. Thanks to this location, the baby can swallow and breathe at the same time and is not in danger of suffocating. By the fourth month of life, when he begins to babble, the base of the tongue and larynx already have time to drop a little, expanding the region of the pharynx - only now the baby receives a physical apparatus for articulating sounds, and this becomes the fundamental difference between him and his monkey ancestors.

There are other equally good reasons why humans can talk and monkeys can't. These reasons are related to the structure of the brain. When a person uses the voice to communicate, of course, he does not just produce sounds, but encodes a thought into them, thus making it available to others. Coding starts in the cortex hemispheres brain - in its top layer covered with convolutions. Speech arises due to the interaction of three areas of the cortex. One of them - Broca's center - is located in the frontal lobe of the dominant hemisphere. It transmits the code to the adjacent part of the brain that controls the muscles of the face, lower jaw, tongue, palate and larynx, and thereby activates the speech apparatus. Damage to Broca's center causes a form of aphasia (complete or partial loss of speech), in which sounds are articulated slowly and with difficulty.

The second area - Wernicke's center - is located in the temporal lobe of the brain and provides understanding. Damage to Wernicke's center leads to another form of aphasia - speech, remaining fluent, becomes meaningless. The arcuate bundle of nerve fibers, which in Latin is the furious name "fasciculus arcuatus", apparently transmits auditory impulses from Wernicke's center to Broca's center, which makes it possible to repeat the heard word aloud.

speech centers

The third area, adjacent to the center of Wernicke, is called the angular gyrus and occupies a key position at the junction of those parts of the cerebral cortex that control vision, hearing and touch, that is, they receive information from the outside world. The angular gyrus is connected to them by bundles of nerve fibers and plays the role of a kind of switch, providing interaction between different types signals coming from outside. For example, it allows the brain to associate the visual signal caused by the sight of a cup with the auditory signal generated when the hand touches the cup. The crucial importance of such associations for speech becomes particularly evident when we observe how young children learn the names of objects. Receiving an answer to the question "what is it?", the child associates the visual image of the object with the sound of the word and thus perceives the name, automatically fixing the auditory code of this association in memory. This process of associating and remembering is the first step and the foundation for language acquisition.

The monkey brain is generally similar to the human, but many important areas in it are noticeably less developed. The angular gyrus is so small that it practically cannot provide any interaction between the signals coming from different sense organs. Apparently, signals coming from outside are generally directed to a completely different part of the brain - to the limbic system. All vertebrates, including humans, have this evolutionarily ancient sub-region, located deep in the brain, a kind of hidden world of neural activity. There, among others, reactions associated with hunger, fear, rage and sexual activity find their origin. It also excites the emotions accompanying these reactions. In other words, if a monkey, for example, sees an enemy, the visual signal is transmitted to the limbic system and causes a specific reaction (say, the animal lets out a cry of alarm), as well as fear. Similarly, the sexual signals from the female chimpanzee eventually reach the limbic system of the male and cause sexual arousal, accompanied by corresponding responses.

speech centers

A person's ability to speak depends as much on the structure of his brain as on the vocal apparatus (see p. 101). Homo erectus's vocal apparatus seems to have been more like that of a modern newborn infant than an adult, which means that he spoke, in all likelihood, slowly and awkwardly. However, three main centers should have already formed in his brain, which are in charge of the speech of a modern person (upper figure) and located near the surface of one side of the outer, thinking layer of the brain.

One of them, the angular gyrus, is a switch that receives signals from the organs of vision, hearing and touch and provides a speech response to them. It works in conjunction with Wernicke's center, which serves as a speech selector and retrieves words from memory that correspond to signals from the angular gyrus. The speech apparatus is controlled by Broca's center, which transmits signals that determine the desired words to neighboring nerve centers that control the muscles of the face, lips, tongue and larynx. Broca's center with Wernicke's center is connected by an arcuate bundle bending towards the angular gyrus (middle figure), that is, a bundle of nerve fibers passing under the centers of speech.

Non-verbal audio signals - cries of pain or joy - are controlled by the limbic system (lower figure), which is located deep in the brain. Homo erectus, whose speech abilities were still very limited, may have used this communicative center much more widely than modern man.

In other words, when external information enters the limbic system, it causes an instantaneous, unconscious reaction, or, as anthropologist Jane Lancaster (Rutgers University) writes, the limbic system "generates in the animal the desire to do what it needs to do in order to survive and reproduce."

Audio spectrogram of a newborn baby's "ahhh" cry shows the uniformity of its tones (dark areas)

The responses controlled by the limbic system include auditory signals, such as cries of fear or pleasure. The fact that this type of communication is controlled precisely by the limbic system can be proved using laboratory experiment. If electrodes are implanted in the monkey's limbic system and related areas, and then the brain is stimulated with an electric current, the animal emits signal cries, although the usual visual stimuli that cause such cries are - aggressive behavior dominant male, type of food or enemy - this time are absent. Moreover, other monkeys of the same species in the laboratory react to such sounds as if they were genuine signals - they cringe, look for food, take an alert posture, and so on.

A wide range of discrete tones creates those vowels and consonants that sound in the adult phrase "Moden Man Speaks"

Similar reactions have been observed in patients undergoing brain surgery. When the limbic system of a person is stimulated, the patient also responds to this with sounds - a kind of primal cry. But the sounds controlled by the limbic system, in both monkeys and humans, have nothing to do with the sounds of speech. This purely human gift could appear only when other parts of the brain were sufficiently developed - the angular gyrus, Broca's and Wernicke's centers - and it was then that a man who was still developing far outstripped the dumb monkeys.

Speech sounds

The wavy stripes and zigzags in the drawings on the left represent a visible reproduction of a human voice recorded using a sound spectrograph. Although such recordings are used to study the speech of modern man, some conclusions can be drawn from them about how ancient people spoke.

By fixing the volume (the degree of darkening of the lines) and the pitch (the vertical position of the dark bars) of the sounds, the graph shows which vowels and consonants were pronounced. The cry of a newborn baby (above) consists mainly of a long "ahhh", the two tones of which hardly change. The infant is unable to articulate the individual modulated components needed to pronounce vowels such as "e" or the long "and" in the phrase "moden man spiesx" ("modern man speaks") spoken by an adult (below). Homo erectus, like the modern infant, lacked those parts of the vocal apparatus (see p. YG) that produce the more complex sounds of modern speech. However, the brain of an adult Homo erectus was probably already developed to the extent required for the emergence of oral speech based on the sounds available to him.

It is impossible to accurately indicate the moment when Homo erectus began to use speech. It existed on earth for a million years and, of course, continued to evolve all this time. The development of speech, like the development of other human properties, occurred very gradually. It, in all likelihood, began long before the appearance of the first man - even when his ancestors learned to make and use tools. If before the proto-humans used gestures to communicate, then with the advent of tools, this system of signals ceased to satisfy their needs: the hominids literally did not reach their hands, as they had enough other things to do - carry tools, chop, cut, scrape. In this state of affairs, the ability to use sounds to convey information was a great advantage.

But the process of naming objects could only begin after the vocal apparatus improved, and new connections formed in the brain. This must have taken hundreds of thousands of years, during which the immediate predecessor of man, Australopithecus, evolved.

Some minor mutations may have allowed the late Australopithecus to make more varied sounds than other primates, giving it a definite survival advantage. The richer system of sound signals was undoubtedly very useful for the exchange of information while hunting or gathering food. Then, as the number of meaningful sounds increased, the development of the brain made it possible to differentiate signals more accurately, which led to the appearance of the first similarity of words. And all this time there was a positive interaction between the brain and the vocal apparatus. Feedback- a change in one component led to the development of another, and vice versa.

The success of the brain in the formation of a rudimentary sound code affected the vocal apparatus, and this in turn contributed to the formation of speech centers in the brain, and so on. As a result, by the era of Homo erectus, primitive rudiments of language could have developed. And the first people were already ready to start combining individual sounds or words that meant some specific objects, signs or phenomena related to the area, hunting, family or seasonal weather changes, into the simplest combinations, nevertheless containing a large number of information.

The sound side of the first human speech depended on how far the interconnected development of the vocal apparatus and speech centers of the brain advanced in Homo erectus. Research recent years give some idea about it. Linguist Philip Lieberman (University of Connecticut) analyzed characteristic features modern oral speech, which revealed the special importance of the vocal apparatus. He points out that the pharynx is absolutely necessary for the design of the vowels "a", "i", "u", which occupy a dominant place in all modern languages, be it English or Kyrgyz. Literally all significant units of human speech contain at least one of these sounds. By combining them with various consonants, the human vocal apparatus is not only able to create countless combinations, but - more importantly - to link them with great speed into the coded series of sounds that make up oral speech.

The essence of this process is to combine individual phonetic units into a complex sound that is perceived as a word. When a person pronounces, for example, the word "whale", he does not divide it into sound fragments represented by letters k-i-t, but, on the contrary, combines these elements into a single syllable. human voice able to combine and meaningfully pronounce up to 30 phonetic units per second.

Was the pharynx of Homo erectus sufficiently developed to produce the complex sounds typical of modern humans? Lieberman answers this question in the negative. He believes that the speech of Homo erectus was much more primitive, which, in his opinion, is evidenced by the results of an interesting study that he conducted with the help of anatomist Edmund Krelin (Yale University). Although fossil studies and the reconstructions created from them concerned mainly the descendant of Homo erectus - the Neanderthal, one of the types of Homo sapiens, Lieberman is convinced that these conclusions are applicable to assessing the development of Homo erectus. He and Krelin compared the skulls of modern newborn babies, modern great apes and Neanderthals and found many similarities. In some respects, the skulls of modern babies are more like those of apes and Neanderthals than those of modern humans.

In order to get accurate information about the crucial pharyngeal region, which is located at the base of the skull, Krelin reconstructed the vocal apparatus of several Neanderthals from fossils. Based on the similarities between their skulls and the skulls of modern apes and newborn babies, Krelin was able to determine the place of the larynx in the throat of ancient people. She was noticeably taller than her current position. Then he reconstructed in plasticine the pharyngeal, nasal and oral cavities of an ancient person. Lieberman measured them, compared the results with the size of the vocal apparatus of a modern person and the range of sounds they produced, and then put the resulting figures into an electronic computer to calculate the resonances corresponding to all the forms that the compared vocal apparatus could take.

It turned out that an undeveloped pharynx would not have allowed an ancient person to articulate sounds as quickly as they do modern people; he could not use the basic vowels "a", "i", "y" in rapid combinations. Lieberman and Krelin concluded that for these reasons ancient man must have spoken much more slowly than modern man—perhaps even ten times slower.

The assumption that the ability of ancient man to speak was very limited is supported by another theory concerning very different issues. Anthropologist Grover Krantz has tackled a problem that has long confounded anthropologists—why stone tools Homo erectus for so long "almost did not change at all. For many thousands of years, wherever they were found, they remain almost the same, as if they were all made according to one mental model. Why did they not improve over time?

Krantz put forward an interesting explanation that throws light on how the first people mastered speech. He believes that due to insufficient development of the brain, Homo erectus began to speak much later than modern children. And since his lifespan was short, the period when he could use speech to learn how to make tools and improve them was too short.

In his conclusions about speech and tool-making, Krantz proceeds from the volume of the brain. Taking a brain size of 750 cubic centimeters as a dividing line between humans and their predecessors, Krantz wondered why the average modern human brain is 1,400 cubic centimeters and 65% larger than the brain of Homo erectus (which in turn was 100% more brain Australopithecus).

In search of an answer, Krantz turned to figures reflecting the increase in the brain of a modern person during the first years of his life. By the end of the first year, the baby's brain reaches a volume of 750 cubic centimeters. According to Krantz, this volume can be considered the boundary at which the ability to speak develops - in the next six months, a normal child begins to speak.

By deriving a hypothetical curve for the development of the Homo erectus brain from the stage of infancy to the stage of childhood, Krantz showed that his brain reached the volume of 750 cubic centimeters necessary for speech in the seventh year of life. Until the age of six, according to Krantz, Homo erectus could not speak, since his brain had not yet had time to reach the required volume. If not in physical, then in mental development, Homo erectus lagged behind modern child for about five years.

“By reaching puberty,” Krantz reasoned, “the cultural experience of Homo erectus was limited to seven years, while modern man, reaching puberty, has behind him at least twelve years of accumulation of cultural experience. Estimates of the age of ancient people from the fossils known to us indicate short life expectancy... And for the vast majority, five years was a significant part of their life span. short period active participation in the perception and development of culture inevitably limited the overall volume and complexity cultural heritage passed down from generation to generation."

But even with the limited speech that Krantz and Lieberman suggest, Homo erectus was still able to tell his relatives a lot about himself and about the world around him. Toddlers who are just starting to speak demonstrate very clearly how effective speech can be in its simplest form. At the age of one and a half to two years, only six months after the first word spoken by him, the child begins to use two-word sentences. Moreover, this is not a copy of the speech of adults and not its simplification, but the child's own invention, determined by what can be considered the universal natural rules of grammar. These sentences consist of so-called "open" words - those that can be used separately and at the same time mean something, such as "blanket", "milk", "baby" - and axial words like "give" and "hot". The child connects them to describe the outside world or to encourage people around them to act ("give me a spoon"), but not to express emotions.

Only at the age of three or four does the child begin to consistently put feelings into words. Until then, he, like all non-human primates, has to rely on the limbic system to draw attention to his moods. He won't say, "I'm angry" or "I'm scared," but will show that he's angry or frightened. Rolling on the floor, whimpering or crying are easier means of communication for him than words. In other words, it is easier for him to show his feelings than to describe them. As all parents know, it is not difficult to understand baby talk - so Homo erectus could get by with the very first, most ancient version of human speech, reinforcing its simplest sentences with hand and body movements.

But regardless of the sound of this speech and the age at which he began to speak, the fact remains: Homo erectus also possessed this tool - speech, a tool that, like a wedge, entered between him and environment, accelerating that break with nature, which became the main milestone of its development and the threshold of ours. For the first time in human history, cultural evolution began to overtake biological evolution: instinct and emotion were balanced by custom and thought.

Recently, the Dutch scientist Bart de Boer found out when ancient people began to speak. This happened between 3.3 and 1.2 million years ago, when the air throat sac completely disappeared in hominids. His attempts to imagine what word a person said the very first, gave very interesting and at the same time curious results ...

I don’t know about you, but I have always wondered what was the first word that a person said when he mastered the art of speech? And when did it happen? Unfortunately, until recently, scientists could not answer this question - there was not enough archaeological data. After all, the remains of human ancestors are not found as often as we would like.

Nevertheless, the question "when" can now be answered quite definitely. According to anthropologists, the Afar Australopithecus (Australopithecus afarensis), one of the earliest ancestors of modern man, could not yet speak (and he lived about 3.3 million years ago in Africa), but Homo antesessor, who lived 1.2 million years ago in Europe, already could. It should be noted that in this case we are talking not about sound communications in general, but about the ability to speak articulately. So, Australopithecus simply didn’t have it - as reconstructions showed, this creature still had a throat (or guttural) air sac characteristic of all primates, which interfered with any intelligible chatter.

This organ is an expanded branch of the upper part of the trachea. It is present in all monkeys (except modern humans, of course) and acts as a resonator for sound communications. During inhalation or exhalation, air passes through it, it inflates and thereby amplifies any sound. It is thanks to a highly developed throat pouch that South American howler monkeys (Aloautta) can make their terrible cries that can drive any unprepared tourist crazy.

Of the great apes, this organ is most developed in gibbons (with the help of it, males can sing intricate "serenades" to the ladies of their hearts), but in orangutans, chimpanzees and gorillas, it is already much smaller. A small rudimentary pouch was also preserved in Australopithecus, as well as the first species of the genus Homo - H. habilis, and, possibly, early H. erectus. And only in later "upright people", to whom Homo antesessor is also close, does it, apparently, completely disappear. This is easy enough to determine by the position of the hyoid bone in the remains: if it is "pulled up" high, like in a chimpanzee, then the sac was still present, and if it is lowered low, like in ours, then it was no longer there.

Why was it impossible for early hominids to communicate with intelligible human-like speech because of the airy throat sac? This was recently established by a speech evolution specialist from the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands) Bart de Boer. He conducted a curious experiment: first he built an artificial human speech apparatus from plastic tubes. It is noteworthy that one half of the models had an air throat sac, while the other half did not. Next, the researcher passed air through these devices. As a result, he managed to record several dozen sounds, both similar to vowels and consonants.

The scientist then played the sounds to 22 volunteers and asked them to determine what those vowels and consonants were. If the survey participants answered correctly, then de Boer played the sound to them again, but with the addition of noise that made it difficult to understand. If the answer was incorrect, then the noise level, on the contrary, decreased.

The results of the study showed that people were better at distinguishing between vowels and consonants, which were "pronounced" by the model of the mouth of a modern person, even if the volunteers were disturbed by noise. But the mechanism that copied the structure of the speech organs of our ancestors, that is, containing the air bag, gave out sounds that no one could make out even without noise. From this, it was concluded that the very presence of an air bag reduced the intelligibility of pronouncing even individual sounds. What is there to say about whole syllables!

From the experiments it also became clear why the airy throat sac prevented articulate speech - the air passing through it generated a vibration that often drowned out the sound itself. So as soon as he disappeared, the first hominids were finally able to understand various sounds. And this is the first step to normal speech.

Evolutionary biologists suggest that the disappearance of this sac was due to a change in the structure of the upper body. ancient ancestor people - the more he straightened up, the less space was left in the throat for this organ. Of course, one should not think that as soon as the throat pouch disappeared, people immediately began to chat with each other. Many factors contributed to the appearance of speech - the development of special structures in the brain, and the shortening of the lower jaw, and a change in the location of the articulatory muscles on the face. Just the air bag was the last obstacle to human communication- as soon as he disappeared, articulate speech became possible in principle.

So, ancient people started talking in the interval from 3.3 to 1.2 million years ago. The spread, to be sure, is not small, although judging by the geological time scale, it is only a fraction of a second. But, nevertheless, the question "when", finally, scientists managed to answer. But what about the very first word?

Bart de Boer tried to solve this riddle as well. Having compiled a model of ancient communication, he came to the conclusion that the ancestors of man, at first, most likely communicated using syllables consisting of two sounds - a vowel and a consonant. The lightest vowel sound for ancient man, according to his experiments, was "u". But as for consonants, everything is much more complicated - the scientist found out that the sounds "d", "k" and "x" were most easily given to our ancestors.

So, perhaps the first word of the creature that finally got the opportunity to speak articulately was "du" (here we recall the famous exclamation "D" oh! "of the notorious Homer Simpson, the hero of the popular animated series). Or the ancestors of man, like the inhabitant of the planet Plyuk from the Kin-Dza-Dza galaxy, greeted each other for the first time with the word “ku.” But perhaps things were even more interesting.

The fact is that the sound "x" is easier to pronounce than "d" or "k" - it does not need a sufficiently clear articulation of the lips. So, it is possible that the first word of a person was ... the very one that not particularly smart Russian teenagers write on the walls of the barn, although they are well aware that firewood is lying there. "Y" at the end (or, as philologists say, an iotizing sound) could well have come from a sharp exhalation - it is precisely from this action that it is born.

If this is so, then it turns out that, having learned to speak, the first thing an ancient person cursed. And although, of course, this syllable was unlikely to have abusive overtones - in Chinese, for example, the syllable hui is very common, but never means the organ necessary for reproduction (in Chinese it will be zhi, read as "zhi"), but it's still funny to assume that, having just learned to speak, a person immediately expressed everything What do you think about this world...

Research

1. Introduction

2. Main body

2.1. How did the account come about?

2.2. Writing numbers for different peoples

2.3. counting devices.

3. Conclusion

4. Literature.

Introduction

I chose the topic "How people learned to count" because I was interested in who and how first came up with numbers, numbers and counting. I was also interested in account records in different countries.

Targetmy work: to understand how people learned to count.

. To achieve my goal, I set myself such tasks:

· To study the history of the emergence of numbers, numbers and counting.

· Learn how to register an account in different countries.

Objectsmy research are: numbers and numbers.

Productresearch is: presentation and abstract.

Main part

Ancient people obtained their food mainly by hunting. The whole tribe had to hunt for a large animal - a bison or an elk: you cannot cope with it alone. The leader of the raid was usually the oldest and most experienced hunter. So that the prey did not leave, it had to be surrounded, well, at least like this: five people on the right, seven behind, four on the left. Here you can't do without an account! And the leader of the primitive tribe coped with this task. Even in those days when a person did not know such words as "five" or "seven", he could show the numbers on his fingers.

There are even now on earth tribes that, when counting, cannot do without the help of their fingers. Instead of the number five, they say "hand", ten - "two hands", and twenty - "the whole person", - here the toes are counted.

Many, many years passed. A person's life has changed. People tamed animals, and the first cattle breeders appeared on the earth, and then farmers.

The knowledge of people gradually grew, and the further, the more the need for the ability to count and measure increased. Cattle breeders had to count their herds, and at the same time, the number could go up to hundreds and thousands. The farmer needed to know how much land to sow in order to feed himself until the next harvest. What about sowing time? After all, if you sow at the wrong time, you will not get a harvest!

The calculation of time by lunar months was no longer suitable. A more accurate calendar was needed. In addition, people are increasingly faced with big numbers which are difficult or even impossible to remember. I had to figure out how to write them down. The first way to "write" numbers- notches on animal bones, knots on ropes, A pebbles or other objects were used for counting.

About five thousand years ago, almost simultaneously in different countries - Babylonia, Egypt, China - was born new way number entries. People came up with the idea that numbers can be written not just in notches-units, but in digits: hundreds separately. This was a very important discovery. Counting and writing numbers is now much easier.

The ancient Egyptians, just like we do now, counted in tens. But they had special digits only for digits: units, tens, hundreds, thousands.

In ancient Babylon, they counted not in tens, but in sixties. A mathematician would say that the counting system there was not decimal, like ours, but sexagesimal. The number sixty played with them the same role as ten with us.

The Babylonians used only two numbers. A vertical line denoted one unit, and an angle of two recumbent lines denoted ten. They got these lines in the form of wedges, because the Babylonians wrote with a sharp stick on damp clay tablets, which were then dried and fired.

The Maya were considered twenties - they had a vigesimal counting system. Numbers from 1 to 20 were indicated by dots and dashes.

The Chinese, like the Egyptians, used the decimal system. Here are drawn Chinese characters- numbers:

The hieroglyphs for writing numbers were too inconvenient, too many different hieroglyphs would have to be memorized. For further improvement counting arts one of two things was needed - or move on to a more convenient letter, i.e. move from hieroglyphs to letters, or invent some new trick, which makes it easier to write numbers with special characters. Some nations took the first path, others - the second.

The early development of written counting was hampered by the complexity of arithmetic operations with the multiplication of numbers that existed at that time. In addition, few people knew how to write and there was no educational material for writing - parchment began to be produced around the 2nd century BC, papyrus was too expensive, and clay tablets were inconvenient to use. These circumstances explain the appearance of a special calculating device - abacus.

By the 5th century BC. The abacus was widely used in Egypt, Greece, and Rome. It was a board with grooves, in which, according to the positional principle, some objects were placed - pebbles, bones.

Ancient Greek abacus (board or " salami board" named after the island of Salamis in the Aegean) was a plank sprinkled with sea sand. There were grooves in the sand, on which numbers were marked with pebbles. One groove corresponded to ones, another to tens, and so on. If more than 10 pebbles were accumulated in a groove during counting, they were removed and one pebble was added in the next category.

Chinese abacus suan pan consisted of a wooden frame divided into upper and lower sections. Sticks correspond to columns, and beads correspond to numbers. For the Chinese, the basis of the account was not a dozen, but a five.

In Rus', for a long time, they counted by bones, laid out in piles. Approximately from the 15th century, it became widespread "board count" , which almost did not differ from ordinary accounts and was a frame with reinforced horizontal ropes, on which drilled plum or cherry pits were strung.