It's fascinating how our number systems even evolved. They've done studies with remote Amazon tribespeople where they show them a number of dots and ask them how many there are, and found that their words for what we thought were their numbers 1-5 actually translate to more like 1, 2, 3, '4-ish' and 'many'. Interestingly when they've done the same with very young children then they've got similar results.

Counting is something that only took off when large-scale civilisations (and the need to pay taxes!) took off - before this there was never really a need to be specific when counting a quantity of more than about 4 or 5. Maths developed as an offshoot of language rather than something distinct and so our counting systems suffer from the quirks that come with this.