Los números nos hicieron como somos

Unlike virtually all books on numbers—whether written by mathematicians or framed from their perspective—*Numbers: The Universal Language* (published in Spanish as *Los números nos hicieron como somos*) ventures into very different territory, drawing on disciplines such as psychology, anthropology, and linguistics. Its author, anthropologist Caleb Everett, demonstrates that numbers are, in fact, a linguistically based invention unique to our species. Quantities exist in nature—often with great regularity, such as the years between cicada reproductive cycles or the days in a lunar cycle. Yet numbers themselves—the symbolic embodiments of these regular quantities—do not exist outside of human creation. Nor were we born with the ability to precisely distinguish most quantities, although we do possess innate capacities that allow us to estimate amounts and accurately distinguish between small sets of items. Numbers are human creations—akin to cooking, stone tools, or the wheel—that transformed the environments in which we live and evolved (facilitating, for instance, the development of agriculture and writing). Ultimately, they transformed the human condition. In a world without numbers—in *anumeric* cultures (unlike language, numbers are absent in some of the world's civilizations)—many questions make no sense; they can be neither asked nor answered. Focusing on the transformative power of verbalizing numbers, while also examining the role of written numerals, Caleb Everett explores in this groundbreaking book the scope of this transformation—one of the key inventions in the history of our species.