Many primitive peoples used pebbles, how we use the balls on a calculating machine. Die Inkas in Peru (picture) knot cords used.
We do not know, when early humans began, using spoken language instead of sign language, to communicate with her family and her neighbors; but we know, that people have been speaking words for thousands of years, before they learned, to write down those words. Likewise, thousands of years passed, until man, long after he had learned, to name numbers, used signs for these numbers, for example the character "3" for the word "three". People needed the numbers. Maybe that's where it started, that a caveman the saber-toothed tiger, which he had captured, wanted to exchange it with his neighbor for three spears. Or maybe that's how it started, that a caveman's boy wanted to tell his brothers and sisters about the four great mammoths, that he had seen.
Notching a stick as a counting tool has been around since the earliest times. Each notch meant a "one".
Early humans only knew “one” and two"; any greater number was referred to as "many.".