Animals Give Clues to Origins of Human Number-Crunching

Sounds like a candidate for the Ig Nobel Prize in Biology.

Watch out for those tricky horses...

"Clever Hans

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia For Grimm's tale, see Clever Hans (fairy tale). Clever Hans performs

Clever Hans (in German: der Kluge Hans) was an Orlov Trotterhorse that was claimed to have been able to perform arithmeticand other intellectual tasks.

After a formal investigation in 1907, psychologist Oskar Pfungstdemonstrated that the horse was not actually performing these mental tasks, but was watching the reactions of his human observers. Pfungst discovered this artifact in the research methodology, wherein the horse was responding directly to involuntary cues in the body language of the human trainer, who had the faculties to solve each problem. The trainer was entirely unaware that he was providing such cues.^[1] In honour of Pfungst's study, the anomalous artifact has since been referred to as the Clever Hans effect and has continued to be important knowledge in the observer-expectancy effect and later studies in animal cognition. Hans was studied by the famous German philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf in the early 20th century. Stumpf was observing the sensational phenomena of the horse, which also added to his impact on phenomenology."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans

It's all true.

Mr Ed.

Don't cuckoos always remove one egg from a nest before adding their own so that the foster parents don't become suspicious.

That would imply not only the ability to count, but also a seeming much more sophisticated feat, the ability to consider theory of mind.

Come to think of it, brood parasitism does seem to involve theory of mind.

Maybe it removes one or more of the eggs to make room for its own (according to this video).

https://youtu.be/dAU5MTXmAPY

It (numerosity) has been studied in a number of animals. It would be interesting to see if there were not names for numbers how well humans would do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sense_in_animals

'...if there were not names for numbers how well would humans do....'

.

We would do the very best. No one would be able to count higher.