Recent research has increasingly employed numeracy to approximate human capital. In particular, the age heaping method has been used to calculate numeracy values, taking advantage of the wide availability of census data and similar sources. For this reason, this method can often be applied not only for larger time spans but also for smaller territorial units than other historical indicators of human capital. But is this approach complementary to other more standard proxies of human capital? To answer this, we compare numeracy with another major indicator of human capital: literacy. The results show that numeracy correlates well with literacy. This is underlined by descriptive historical evidence for regions in Europe and OLS regressions for a number of today?s developing countries.