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This article focuses on a big corpus of mathematics text books from a high school level, published in Spain from 1970 to 2005. The authors work with analytic categories that are taken from various models in order to suggest a methodology that includes the didactic approach to the mathematics contents, the graphic-symbolic language, mathematical problems and exercises, as well as the methodological innovations and the learning-teaching processes. The characteristics from these text books are described in each stage (there are three of them) in which the analyzed period is divided. In the conclusion, we emphasize the evolution of the analysis of these aspects from three points of view: the formal, the formative and the content one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discuses the prehistory of mathematics and the representation of the human mind. It describes the creation of symbolic records by prehistoric peoples in France and Spain in the Cantabrian Palaeolithic age in order to explore the ways in which primitive cultures understood the mind. It then discusses the origins of mathematical representation on cave illustrations, along with the origins of human language. Other subjects under discussion include the origins of human consciousness and thought, the illustration of a hyoid bone in the Altamira Cave, and the origins of writing.