ABSTRACT
Paleoanthropology is concerned with human origins. The starkly contrasting views of Bertrand Russell and Aaron Bakst cited above on the origin of counting call for clarification—and not simply from the viewpoint that a philosopher and a mathematician inhabit two different academic worlds. If the origin of arithmetic counting lies in an upright hominid posture, then there are empirical grounds for explaining why numbers as such are not essential to counting, but why perceptual, i.e., felt, correspondences are. Upright posture is pictured by paleoanthropologists as one of the dominant themes, if not the dominant theme of early hominid existence. The possibility of a frontside and a backside is a possibility only for an upright creature. With the possibility of hominid upright posture, there is the possibility of precisely felt three-dimensional binary correspondences. Other aspects of upright hominid life, functional as well as structural, would have reinforced an awareness of the fundamental locomotor binary periodicities.
