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Article: HARPER'S INDEX 2000.(human beings have always seemed to have an obsession about counting and numbers, therefore the widespread interest in the year 2000)(includes realted statistics on various topics)
- Article from:
- Harper's Magazine
- Article date:
- January 1, 2000
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 Harper's Magazine Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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More than twenty millennia ago, long after we had assigned numerical values to our fingers, human beings began to keep tallies. Today we can study the lines notched into a 30,000-year-old bone, the clay tokens collected in a 5,000-year-old hollow ball, or the hieroglyphs carved into a 1,200-year-old limestone stela and determine the number of bison a Cro-Magnon hunter once killed, the profits enjoyed by an anonymous Sumerian, or the length of the solar year as reckoned by Mayan priests (365.242 days). As with all artifacts, what such numbers tell us is sometimes unreliable, often arbitrary, always incomplete. We tend to know far more about the scale of war and wealth a ...