Crows Reveal an Ancient Foundation for Math: Zero, Probability, and the Neural Roots of Numbers
New findings from crow research by Andreas Nieder show that carrion crows understand zero as a numerical quantity and can perform probabilistic reasoning to pick the more rewarding option, suggesting that the cognitive building blocks of mathematics—quantity sense and probabilistic inference—are ancient and shared with primates and preverbal human infants, implying human math evolved by building on these prehuman foundations.
