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Instead of making little groups of marks over and over, the scribes created symbols for each type of grouping; in a quinary system, a scribe might make a certain mark for one, a different symbol for a group of five, yet another mark for a group of 25, and so forth.

Numbers like seven and 31 belonged to all of these systems, quinary, decimal, and vigesimal alike.

Modern mathematicians would say that Gog, the wolf carver, used a five-based or quinary counting system.

Even in the South American binary counting schemes, linguists see the beginnings of a quinary system.

Perhaps then the Anthropocene deserves recognition as the beginning of a new geologic period, perhaps known as the Quinary or even the Anthropogene.