The title is from the article. I dunno why you think the author who took the time to write the article deserves this gotcha or why we should divert focus from the article. If it was editorial by the submitter then yeah maybe...
Edit: on review it does seem to be on topic, sorry. It seems unconvincing to me because it has only multiplication and division, where addition and subtraction point more to recognizing it as a workable number system. I'd like to see an expert's analysis.
I suspect this article refers to binary positional notation, specifically, although it could have been more explicit about that.
Having said that it would indeed have surprised me a lot if powers-of-two based calculations wouldn't be among the oldest ones we have. Doubling or halving things seems quite natural.
One thing that occurs to me is that we often fail to believe that people 3000 years ago were just as smart as we are, blinded both by our knowledge of them and our certainty of their limited knowledge. Limited knowledge does not mean that one is not innately smart though, and unable to figure some stuff out...
> One thing that occurs to me is that we often fail to believe that people 3000 years ago were just as smart as we are ...
I think of this as "hubris of the now." This is where people cannot fathom how previous generations could achieve what they did without the tools and/or knowledge which exists in the present.
An example of this is found when contemplating how atmospheric differential equations were solved with computers having about 4k of RAM in the 1940's.
https://medium.com/@jillplatts/ancient-egyptians-the-origina...