Humankind's development of Mathematics was necessitated by the need to calculate and record amounts equally and to measure land and constructions accurately.  How many goats do I own? How long must my home's wall be? How do I split my land amongst my heirs? More than simple counting, this was the actual manipulation of numbers. Most cultures initially had widely different means of recording these figures; witness the base 12 system of Mesopotamia and the difficult-to-use Roman system of numerical notation.