350 Million Years BC |
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| The number system we use on a day-to-day basis is the decimal system, which is based on ten digits: zero through nine. The name decimal comes from the Latin decem meaning ten, while the symbols we use to represent these digits arrived in Europe around the thirteenth century from the Arabs who, in turn, acquired them from the Hindus. | ||
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| As the decimal system is based on ten digits, it is said to be
base-10 or radix-10, where the term radix comes from the Latin word meaning
"root" . Outside of specialist requirements such as computing, base-10 numbering
systems have been adopted almost universally. This is almost certainly due to the fact that we happen to have ten fingers (including our thumbs). If mother nature had decreed six fingers on each hand we would probably be using a base-twelve numbering system. |
In fact this isn't as far-fetched as it may at first seem. The
term "tetrapod" refers to an animal which has four limbs, along with hips
and shoulders and fingers and toes. In the mid-1980s, paleontologists discovered
Acanthostega who, at approximately 350 million years old, is the most primitive tetrapod
known -- so primitive in fact that these creatures still lived exclusively in water and
had not yet ventured onto land.
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| After the dinosaurs (who were also tetrapods) exited the stage, humans were one branch of the tetrapod tree that eventually inherited the earth (along with hippopotami, hedgehogs, aardvarks, frogs, ...... and all of the other vertebrates). Ultimately, we're all descended from Acanthostega or one of her cousins. The point is that Acanthostega had eight fully evolved fingers on each hand (see the figure above), so if evolution hadn't taken a slight detour, we'd probably have ended up using a base-sixteen numbering system, which would have been jolly handy when we finally got around to inventing computers, let me tell you! (As a point of interest, the Irish hero Cuchulain was reported as having seven fingers on each hand, but this would have been no help in computing whatsoever.) | ||
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| These notes are abstracted from the book Bebop BYTES Back (An Unconventional Guide to Computers) Copyright Information |
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