When the word “quantitative” is mentioned, “qualitative” pops in your head at the exact same time. Only because they sound alike and you don’t want to make the mistake of confusing the two. Oxford’s Dictionary of Politics states that “quantitative methods are the range of mathematical and statistical techniques used to analyze data. In order to test empirical theories and hypotheses, political scientists draw on a wide range of sources, including primarily qualitative data such as documents, unstructured interviews, and participant observation, and primarily quantitative data such as those derived from sample surveys or aggregate statistics such as election results, census materials, or cross-national statistical series.” To analyze quantitative data, you have to find order within the information or data. Finding a pattern within the data and compare it with the variables to see if they are related. Using quantitative methods in business is primarily used to make information and data make sense in order to make a decision about something. For hundreds of years, humans have found a way to make profit. It seems unfair to our ancestors to think quantitative methods didn’t exist even back in prehistoric times. As long as there were transactions being made, there was some form of quantitative method being used to make decisions for that business.
There are so much facts, statistics, and information to take into account when attempting to run a business, no matter how miniature that it is massively supportive to make acquainted with ways to enumerate this information to make it comprehensible. In Prehistoric Times, there were thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of business owners. To help the community and world, we had prehistoric doctors, potters, farmers, hunter and gathers, maids, etc.

Above is a prehistoric Babylonian record. We don’t know exactly what it says, however, historians say it is a record of transactions from a merchant. This is an example of the way quantitative methods were used in business during the prehistoric times. This information was probably used to make decisions like what and how much more products should be produced in the future, or to tell who their most frequent customers were. Also, they probably had records on how their competitors were doing, if they had any. Of course, back then the methods weren’t called “quantitative methods in business,” but nonetheless they were just that. The Middle Ages is an era of European history that lasted starting the 5th until the 15th centuries. It began with the end of the Western Roman Empire, and was trailed by the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery. The Middle Ages is the middle period of the traditional division of Western history into Classical, Medieval, and Modern periods. In movies and television, the Medieval Age is portrayed as a time where knights charged into battle, hopeless romantic relationships between royalty and commoners, and great arts and breakthrough innovations. However, for regular citizens during that time, life was awfully routine. Most were running businesses and trying to have enough of anything to survive year round. Many of the families had little time and the money to study, the level of learning and mathematical familiarity of the general population dropped still more. By this time schools were abridged to modest or no arithmetic, it is doubtful whether few knew more than basic counting and finger reckoning. But as we learned during Prehistoric times, quantitative method was used; they just didn’t call it that.