The earliest “true” Chinese writing consists of divinatory inscriptions on scraps of bone from the Shang Dynasty (about 1200 BCE). These “oracle bones” show a writing system capable of expressing sound values and numerals counting into the tens of thousands, traits suggesting both were preceded by earlier forms. The small numerals (one to four) expressed numbers through the quantity of their elements, while the large numerals (five and higher) were conventions. The conventions perhaps resolved the perceptual indistinguishability of quantities above about four, a limitation of the number sense. Alternatively, the conventions could have been chosen as shapes that were easy to tell apart, though scholars think the forms depicted objects whose names sounded something like the words for numbers. Another hypothesis suggests the conventions depicted finger-counting, and indeed, the signs resemble the finger-counting system found in China today. However, there is no way to tell how long a gestural system like finger-counting might persist unchanged, and Neolithic signs suggest the numeral system could have emerged thousands of years before the Shang numerals.