Hey everybody and thanks for your time. So this was more something of a showerthought and i thought somebody here might have an idea about it. I checked with the rules and it seems to fit.
For anybody checking in out of interest/boredness i'll provide some context/explanation at first: that we have a "decimal" counting system means that it is on the basis of ten. Basically if you coun upwards you get ten single digit numbers (0-9) before you add another digit. So if you coun in Binary you'd have two: (0,1 then 10 and 11, then 100, 101..and so on) if you'd count one the basis of 6 it'd go 0-6;10,11..16;20..26 a.s.o.
Now some context for my question: I sadly couldn't find the source right now but i read it a bunch of times that we are pretty unfortunate that we have historically developed to use the decimal system. A basis of six would be far preferred, just look at how our time is divided into sixties or how the number with the most dividents is 6,12,24, etc. I'd reckon the reason is that we have ten fingers? The answer seems intuitive but i feel like there is more to it. Further, how did these kind of numbers actually devlop? After all i know the basis of mathematics are found in old greece but how did other "high-cultures" of that time cope with numbers and counting. And (again) did they all work with a decimal system from the start?
You might be interested to know that the concept of zero is by no means universal. It had to be developed.
I say this because it's tangentially related. Math appears to be uniform to you (and me) because it's what we're exposed to.
According this this the Mayans used a base 20 system (I'm familiar with this from a math teacher using it as an example, not a history class, so I googled "maya base 20" and got this link, I apologize if I'm misrepresenting Mayan mathematics/nuance).
Before trains, cities had local times. This made it difficult to coordinate trains, so standardization was done.
That is to say; there are other numbering systems that have developed in the past, but it's easy to forget them just like it's easy to forget that time wasn't always standard, just because it is now.