There were no numerals. If you wanted 15 bushels of wheat you needed a tablet with 15 marks corresponding to wheat on it. The token system is one piece of artifactural evidence proving that counting, like anything else, is not spontaneous. Dean Falk notes of the above analysis, It is instructive that it took up to 7,000 years for abstract clay tokens representing animals to occur after realistic images of a bull and deer first appeared at the entrance of Beldibi Cave in Turkey. It took another 5,000 years for humans to make the cognitive leaps from tokens to two-dimensional pictographs, numerals, and photmemes and another 1,500 years to establish a phonetic alphabet.
Numerals are an invention of man.
To expect Homo erectus, Neanderthal and early Homo sapiens, to have used numerals or writing prior to the economic NEED for these inventions, is to ask too much. Homo erectus and Neanderthal treated numbers and counting in precisely the same way that anatomically modern man did prior to the agricultural revolution. Once again, these archaic forms behave in a fashion similar to us and theologically should be considered similarly. In order to exclude H. erectus and Neanderthal from humanity's family, one must logically say that counting is something that animals are capable of. Ever since the horse, Clever Hans was exposed as a fraud, counting has been considered a human activity.