ABSTRACT

Educationalists have taken a different approach to psychologists and emphasised the role that the environment plays in the development and learning of mathematics. For example, Ubiratan D’Ambrosio proposed the idea of ‘ethnomathematics’ which ‘explores cultural specific mathematical practices and is substantially different from the formalised ways of mathematical knowledge’. This multicultural view of the development of mathematics leads to a broader perspective on the subject leading to a cross-curricular view of mathematics teaching and learning. Within biological anthropology, comparative researchers have examined the numerical abilities of non-human species in order to illuminate the evolutionary origins of mathematical ability. The fact that numerical abilities are found in a range of distantly related species suggests that numerical abilities have a quite ancient evolutionary origin, upon which formal mathematical understanding may be built.