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Our unprecedented counting and arithmetic abilities are deeply rooted in our heritage as primates and vertebrates. Findings in developmental psychology, anthropology, and animal cognition indicate that a basic understanding of number rests on an evolutionarily and ontogenetically primeval neural system for non-symbolic number representations. To decipher the neuronal foundations of number representations from a comparative and evolutionary point of view, we studied single-cell activity in the association cortices of behaving human patients, monkeys and crows. Our data show an impressive correspondence of behavioral and neuronal mechanisms in these diverse species. This suggests that neuronal coding mechanisms for quantity categories have evolved independently based on convergent evolution, and irrespective of the precise origin and anatomical structures of vertebrate brains.

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