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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kermit4karate" data-source="post: 9731693" data-attributes="member: 7053643">I get the feeling you're being deliberately obtuse. If you read those resources I linked to or even just Google a little you'd see the preponderance of cultural evidence pointing to why base 10 has been the default. Anthropologists and cognitive scientists generally agree that human anatomy strongly influenced the choice of base 10. We have ten fingers, and across cultures, finger counting was the earliest and most intuitive method for keeping track of quantities. Once symbols for numbers were developed, this natural finger tally system was codified into writing and mathematics.There's a massive amount of evidence to support this. Other numbering systems like base 12 (ancient Sumeria and Babylonia), base 20 (Mayan), base 2 (rare historically but became the bases of computing due to its fit with electrical on/off states) and others are such obvious edge cases throughout history. There are literally hundreds of civilizations that came to base 10 on their own but just a handful (pun intended) of societies that organically adopted other models, and most of those eventually came around to using base 10 as well.</blockquote>