Climatic Instability, Food Storage, and the Development of Numerical Counting: A Cross-Cultural Study

Abstract

A model is proposed that explains the variability in counting systems found in traditional societies. Societies that live in areas of climatic instability, in terms of temperature and precipitation extremes, tend to have periodic starvation and famine, which in turn stimulates societies to store and preserve food. The need to store and preserve food during one season for use in another stimulates societies to develop abilities to count to higher numbers in order to accurately estimate food storage requirements. This model is successfully tested cross-culturally on two separate worldwide samples (N= 69 andN = 136 respectively).