I have a hunch mathematical thinking goes waaaayyy back into our human (and more-than-human) ancestry…
Ancient Pottery Shows Humans Were Doing Math 3,000 Years Before Numbers Existed – The Debrief:
Long before humans carved numbers into clay tablets or scratched equations onto stone, people in the ancient Near East were already dividing space, counting patterns, and thinking in mathematical sequences—without ever writing a single numeral.
Evidence for this surprisingly prehistoric mathematical thinking doesn’t come from proto-calculators or tally sticks, but from something far more familiar: pottery.