Considering the evolution of the oldest counting systems, the author finds its similarity with the evolution of counting in children. On the basis of this typological similarity, relying on the ideas of L. S. Vygotsky, as well as on the work of the American researcher D. Schmandt-Besser on counting systems in the ancient Near East, the author reconstructs the processes in the evolution of consciousness that led to the emergence of abstract counting, writing and, as a result, conceptual thinking. Keywords: ancient counting technologies, abstract counting, concrete counting, evolution of mental activity. The rudimentary state in which the problem of concrete counting still exists is mainly due to the fact that until recently it was of interest only to historians of mathematics. However, the one-line evolutionist approach, which is determined to see in each phenomenon only another step in progressive development, is counterproductive when studying archaic phenomena of culture and science. Using it, the researcher can see in prehistoric and even early historical forms of scientific knowledge only the same science, only in a more primitive, rudimentary form. The idea that he is dealing with something qualitatively different from science will not even occur to him, and if he does, he will not know what to do with this discovery - his approach does not accept otherwise. B. A. Frolov's book "Numbers in Paleolithic Graphics" (Frolov, 1974) is a work that translates this problem into a historical and cultural plane and finally provides a definite breakthrough in its development. The problem posed in it required extensive interdisciplinary research in the future with the participation of specialists in non-archaeology, but this did not happen. Meanwhile, the results of B. A. Frolov's research not only had numerous ethnographic parallels (as later pointed out by V. V. Ivanov [Ivanov, 1999]), but also found support in some ideas of L. S. Vygotsky [Vygotsky, 1996]. The fact that ... Читать далее