this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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This is not even slightly true.
Base 10 was used because people in one influential area counted the tips of their fingers. But there are recorded (and in some cases still living!) finger counting systems where they count using the gaps between the fingers (giving us base 4 or base 8 depending on how many hands are used), using the thumb and the finger segments (base 12), the same as base 12 plus the finger roots (base 16), etc.
There is literally nothing "natural" about base 10. Indeed it's not even a particularly useful system; bases 12 and 16 are far more useful given how you can do divide them in many more ways than base 10. It just happened to be the one that was used by the cultures that became most influential.