Editing Cardinality (section)

=== Prehistory ===
A crude sense of cardinality, an awareness that groups of things or events compare with other groups by containing more, fewer, or the same number of instances, is observed in a variety of present-day animal species, suggesting an origin millions of years ago.<ref>Cepelewicz, Jordana   ''[https://www.quantamagazine.org/animals-can-count-and-use-zero-how-far-does-their-number-sense-go-20210809/ Animals Count and Use Zero. How Far Does Their Number Sense Go?]'', [[Quanta Magazine|Quanta]], August 9, 2021</ref> Human expression of cardinality is seen as early as {{val|40000}} years ago, with equating the size of a group with a group of recorded notches, or a representative collection of other things, such as sticks and shells.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://mathtimeline.weebly.com/early-human-counting-tools.html|title=Early Human Counting Tools|website=Math Timeline|access-date=2018-04-26}}</ref> The abstraction of cardinality as a number is evident by 3000 BCE, in Sumerian [[History of mathematics|mathematics]] and the manipulation of numbers without reference to a specific group of things or events.<ref>Duncan J. Melville (2003). [http://it.stlawu.edu/~dmelvill/mesomath/3Mill/chronology.html Third Millennium Chronology] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180707213616/http://it.stlawu.edu/~dmelvill/mesomath/3Mill/chronology.html |date=2018-07-07 }}, ''Third Millennium Mathematics''. [[St. Lawrence University]].</ref>