Prehistoric史前的
The origins of mathematical thought lie in the concepts of number, magnitude量，等级, and form. Modern studies of animal cognition认知 have shown that these concepts are not unique to humans. Such concepts would have been part of everyday life in hunter-gatherer狩猎采集 societies. The idea of the "number" concept evolving gradually over time is supported by the existence of languages which preserve the distinction between "one", "two", and "many", but not of numbers larger than two.
Prehistoric artifacts discovered in Africa, dated 20,000 years old or more suggest early attempts to quantify time. The Ishango bone（The Ishango bone is a bone tool, dated to the Upper Paleolithic era. It is a dark brown length of bone, the fibula of a baboon）, found near the headwaters of the Nile river尼罗河 (northeastern Congo刚果), may be more than 20,000 years old and consists of a series of marks carved in three columns running the length of the bone. Common interpretations are that the Ishango bone shows either a tally of the earliest known demonstration of sequences序列 of prime numbers质数 or a six-month lunar calendar. Peter Rudman argues that the development of the concept of prime numbers could only have come about after the concept of division除法, which he dates to after 10,000 BC, with prime numbers probably not being understood until about 500 BC. He also writes that "no attempt has been made to explain why a tally of something should exhibit multiples倍数 of two, prime numbers between 10 and 20, and some numbers that are almost multiples of 10." The Ishango bone, according to scholar Alexander Marshack, may have influenced the later development of mathematics in Egypt as, like some entries on the Ishango bone, Egyptian arithmetic also made use of multiplication by 2; this however, is disputed.有争议
Predynastic Egyptians of the 5th millennium一千年 BC pictorially形象地 represented geometric几何学的 designs. It has been claimed that megalithic巨石构造的 monuments in England and Scotland, dating from the 3rd millennium BC, incorporate包含，吸收 geometric ideas such as circles, ellipses椭圆, and Pythagorean triples in their design. All of the above are disputed however, and the currently oldest undisputed mathematical documents are from Babylonian and dynastic Egyptian sources.