What is a Unit?
Said differently, what is unity?
When did we first learn to count?
When was it that unit measure came into being?
Who were literally the first bean counters?
Counting means we recognize and value sameness. It means we know when there is more than one. There is one, and then another one. Counting begins from this. At some point, the science of economics evolved and it must have been early on, because counting has been around for a long time.
We call them today, units, with names like, ‘cm’, ‘kg’, ‘oz’, ‘mi’, but where does this concept of singularity come from? To be called by any measure a ‘unit’ would be a singularity. One of something by any measure is a unit.
1 is an identity. It denotes, self. It denotes, singularity. It denotes, being. One of something is the perfect opposite of none of anything. Something over nothing. This part of numeracy caught on quick somewhere around 70,000 years ago. Mind it was tens of thousands of years later that it started showing up in Cuneiform, but one cannot escape the reason why it took so long to evolve to this. Counting has gone on for millenia. It’s the one thing we all learn even going back through the ages… Sameness, and count.
We knew long ago what a unit was. From this we derived, unity.