I found that the meaning of the first one was a lot easier, but there are a lot of assumptions about the called sub-functions... Mainly that they actually behave in a way that's consistent with their names. (I've gotten bitten by that a lot).
The second function is harder to to understand in the sense of meaning, but easier to understand in the sense of raw behavior. I can see more of the code that determines it's actual behavior, and can inspect and trust that the logic is appropriate.
One could argue that the same holds for the second example. Sure, the parameter is called `numbers` but who knows what it will contain at runtime. It could be full of vectors, matrices or sheep. _Some_ of the objects could have a custom definitions for __lt__ and __mod__ (custom overloads for the < and % operators in Python).
In that sense, if we accept that `<` and `%` have sensible definitions in the second example, it would only be fair to assume the same for the helper functions first example.
The second function is harder to to understand in the sense of meaning, but easier to understand in the sense of raw behavior. I can see more of the code that determines it's actual behavior, and can inspect and trust that the logic is appropriate.