A new species of flying fox or fruit bat has been discovered on an island south of Manila, it was reported Monday.

The orange-coloured bat with a distinctive white-stripped face was discovered in a protected wildlife area on Mindoro Island, the Philippine Star newspaper said quoting the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR).

The discovery was a result of joint research between the University of Kansas’ Biodiversity Research Center and a team from the Comparative Biogeography and Conservation of Philippine Vertebrates (CBCPV), the paper said.

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The earliest hominoids according to paleoanthropological studies began to use more of its thinking or mental other than its physical capabilities by the advent of the homo sapiens or thinking ape at the end of the Paleolithic period, some 2 million to 10,000 years ago or the Upper Paleolithic when man started to use tools in its daily activities.

At the advent of the Mesolithic Period, humans already have refined its tool making capability and enhanced its hunting capabilities resulting to the decline of animals near his domains requiring him to plan for his next hunting endeavor and this might have further sharpened his thoughts and his development of expressing his concept about quantity by recognizing how to count which is very important in his daily survival and this led him to the discovery of using numbers even before the discovery of writing.

During this period of illiteracy, the concept of quantity and counting was made evident by the use of numbers through the use of some physical representations through objects and some refined tools such as the quipo used by the Incas as tallies using knotted strings to record numbers.

The discovery of writing came as a breakthrough and this gave man the ultimate process to enhance his ability to manipulate or process any physical and abstract entities by the use of numbers and this started the early advancements in the history of mathematics.

By 1800 BC, the Babylonians already had solid knowledge of almost all aspects of elementary arithmetic which is the earliest branch of mathematics as shown in the clay tablet Plimpton 322 which seems to be a list of Pythagorean triples although historians can only guess at the methods used in generating the results because there were no workings to show how the list was originally produced. In the same way the Egyptian Rhind Mathematical Papyrus dated from 1650 BC which was evidently a copy of a much earlier text from 1850 BC shows evidence of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division utilized within a unit fraction system.

Within this period up to the 7th century AD, basic arithmetical operations were very complicated affairs because of the seemingly unsophisticated method of operation and numerical representation that were being used until the introduction of a new numerical and arithmetical system called the “Method of the Indians” which became the arithmetic that we used today.

Hindu-arabic arithmetic system as being called today because the Arabs popularized its use and led the way to its introduction to the Europeans by Fibonacci in 1202 is a much simpler method than all the other arithmetical system is then widely used because it uses zero and place-value notation.

From the early realization of the concept of quantity and counting and onwards, the use and manipulation of numbers to represent physical and abstract entities lead to one of the most important branches of knowledge of humanity that resulted to vast monumental achievements of societies from early civilizations until today as evident in the mysterious constructed monuments of olden times up to the present technological marvels of our time.