History of ancient numeral systems

Numeral systems have progressed from the use of fingers and tally marks, perhaps more than 40,000 years ago, to the use of sets of glyphs able to represent any conceivable number efficiently. The earliest known unambiguous notations for numbers emerged in Mesopotamia about 5000 or 6000 years ago.

Source: Wikipedia — History of ancient numeral systems (CC BY-SA 4.0)