According to scientist David Chivall, the number zero is a bit like The Beatles.

Today, we take both for granted. But, for those who were alive in the 1960s, the four Liverpudlian lads changed everything. "I imagine it's very similar to zero," he mused. Hundreds of years ago, when people first realised that the lack of something could be counted like a number, "it must have been quite a revolutionary idea".

Not long ago, he and his colleagues at Oxford University discovered that the revolution began far earlier than they thought.

The university owns the Bakhshali manuscript, which is essentially an ancient Indian maths textbook full of problems intended to teach merchants arithmetic.

"There's a lot of 'If someone buys this and sells this, how much have they got left?'" says Mathematics Professor Marcus du Sautoy. More importantly, it contains the earliest example of a circular figure, zero, which eventually evolved into the symbol used today.

When du Sautoy and Chivall carbon datedA way of finding out the age of something if it is made from natural materials containing carbon. Scientists measure the amount of carbon-14, a radioactive isotope which decays over time. it, they discovered that it was from the 3rd or 4th Century - around 500 years older than expected.

Around this time, ancient Mayan and Babylonian mathematicians had also invented placeholders to represent nothing (such as the lack of tens in the number 101). But India gave zero its shape and, eventually, became the first to treat it as a number in its own right.

Du Sautoy thinks this is because Indian philosophy is based on concepts like "nirvana and shunya": the idea that meaning is found in contemplating nothingness. It shows that "culture is important in making big mathematical breakthroughs".

And what a breakthrough. Zero helped merchants to balance their books, an essential part of successful trade. It allowed scholars to invent algebraA branch of mathematics in which numbers are replaced by letters to create formulae and equations. This is useful in everything from accounting to architecture. and calculusA branch of mathematics devoted to rates of change., which are central to physics, engineering and medicine. Zero was also key to inventing computingComputers use a binary code (the numbers 1 and 0) to represent data, sound, and images..

In fact, it is "widely seen as one of the greatest innovations in human history", says the president of the Project ZeroA group of Indian and global academics who are trying to solve "the continuing controversy in the world, among mathematicians and laymen alike as to when, where, and why the zero digit was invented"..

No, say some. When it comes to the greatest innovation in history, there is only one contender: the ability to control fire. This helped people to cook food, stay warm, fight off danger, and evolve into Earth's dominant species. Humanity survived for millennia without the number zero, but we could not have done without heat.

"But zero made things interesting," counter mathematicians. It advanced trade, medicine, and technology: the foundations of modern civilisation. Without zero, we would be stuck in ancient ways, with short lifespans, few opportunities, and - perhaps, worst of all - no internet to entertain us. We should celebrate it more often.