Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Tally Marks

Episode Date: May 6, 2024

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why tally marks are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Tally marks, known for being lines, famous for the fifth line across. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why tally marks are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie! Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of tally marks?

Well, I like to do them when I'm in a prison and I do it on the wall to sort of keep the time of like how long I've been there or I sometimes do it when I'm on like a really tiny deserted island where there's like, it's just me and one palm tree, maybe like a glass bottle with a note in it. And then I do tallies on the sand.

Those are the only situations in which I use tally marks. Yeah, I realized I haven't made any in a very long time. Like, it feels weird how long it's been. And I think I was like scorekeeping was the last time. Because otherwise, it's sort of those cartoon situations. Or doing hard time, which you often do, you know? I often do hard time. I've done hard time so many times now, I just call it time.

And thank you to Zed Frank on the Discord with two A's for this topic suggestion, because it turns out it's amazing. And on each episode, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. And this week that is in a segment called... There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to the listener. It is a dimension as vast as space and timeless as its numbers. It is the middle ground between ignorance and knowledge, between science and random topics.

And it lies between the pit of the days without a new episode. And the summit of the takeaways. This is the dimension of numbers. It is an area we like to call the SifPodStats. Do you like my Rod Sterling? Do you like my Rod Sterling who conveniently has seasonal allergies just like I do? Right. Rod Sterling is the host of the show. Rod Sterling is allergy season guy.

Yeah. I always call him Rod Sterling because he's what a gentleman. Yeah. There's a lot more Sterlings. There's Roger Sterling on Mad Men. Anyway, I don't know how he got a Sterling. Why did Rod Sterling take his name from Roger Sterling from Mad Men? Loves the show.

Yeah. Best friends in real life. These are my theories. And that name was submitted by a mmm cat on the Discord. Thank you for that mmm cat. We have a new name every week. Please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit through discord or to siftpod at gmail.com.

This week, as you might think with tally marks, there's a lot of numbers. And the first ones are very ancient and global. The first number is nine. The number nine. That's the oldest number we got. They started there, then went to one. They counted down. It was weird.

And nine is the number of notches that somebody carved into a hyena bone 70,000 years ago. Yeah, I remember. Hyena bone 70,000 years ago. Yeah, I remember before you kids with your smartphones, we had to use hyena bones in math class. Instead of 90s kids, it's 70,000 kids. Yeah. You have your TI-89s. We had hyena bones. Actually, I don't even think they use TI-89s anymore. I don't know what they do. It's probably all on the smartphone now, right?

Yeah, hyena 89, hyena 93. I liked doing tally marks that looked like I spelled outches into a hyena femur, and we'll have a picture linked so you can see that they're probably tally marks. There's not another obvious reason or way that would be there. Could it not be an artistic representation of nine skinny guys standing next to each other? I'm thinking of the skinny guy on the desert island and the big guy on the desert island and that one Looney Tunes and then they're a hot dog and a hamburger and each other's heads. Because there's like two basic shapes of people is hot dog or hamburger. There's no other shapes. Yeah.

You either turn into a hot dog or hamburger when someone hallucinates about eating you on a deserted island when they're really hungry. Yeah, and this community was nine hot dog people and no hamburger people. It was a different social situation. It was a different era. So they think that these are tally marks because I imagine you're butchering a hyena, as I've done many a time, for its delicious tender meat. And so you would expect those marks to probably be different than these like nine consecutive lines, right? Yes. Yeah, it doesn't look like it's for hunting and it doesn't really look decorative either.

We'll talk about a different bone in a little bit that it could be decorative or practical. We'll talk about a different bone in a little bit. It could be decorative or practical. But this one, it was found a couple of years ago by a team led by archaeologist Francesco d'Erico of the University of Bordeaux. And they found it in France because this is so long ago, France had hyenas. It was a different ecosystem. Well, soccer blue. I know. And yeah, this might be the oldest physical

evidence of humans making tally marks. It'd be funny if it was like a tally marks of all the hyenas they'd killed. Yeah. And this bone is also a big find because there's been a long running debate about other bones that may or may not be tallies. There's one that's been called the Labombo bone because it was found in a- That is a good name, Labombo bone. That rolls off the tongue nice. It feels great. And it's a place called Labombo that's on the border of South Africa and Eswatini, formerly called Swaziland. And according to the book Empire of the Sum by journalist and nonfiction writer Keith Houston, it's a notched baboon bone

made about 40,000 years ago. And it was carved with four different tools over an extended period of time. So we think they were tallying or counting something. Hmm. But with different tools? Yeah, we think probably just because either different people did it or this was a very long-running count. I see. And they got new tools over time. I see. And there's also a bone called the Ishango bone that was found in a place in what was the Belgian colony of the Congo.

It was called Isango. And that was carved about 20,000 years ago. Could be a tally stick, but it was also probably a tool handle. And so the many notches on it might be for hand grip. And with a lot of notched bone finds, we wonder if there was a practical reason or an art reason. Right. Whether it's for traction, for art, for counting, are there theories of like what they would be keeping tally of though? Like what kinds of things would you need to count back then? That

might seem like a dumb question, but. No, it's a big one. At what point do you think we needed to start counting? Because like if you've got some, if you've foraged some nuts or berries and you've killed some game, do you need to count it at that point? When you're really early peoples, at what point do you need to count stuff? That's the biggest question, yeah. Because people kind of don't need to count with stuff besides their minds for most purposes in most early communities. And one interesting theory about the libombo bone is that it might have been tracking a woman's menstrual cycle. Oh, okay. No, I feel that. Either her periods or the moon phases and tracking it that way.

Yeah. I feel like that makes sense because it's always good to keep track for those of us who do endure what I like to call the moon's curse. Because, you know, you start to get like symptoms like your head hurts. You just feel kind of off sometimes, you know, not to be stereotypical about it. But yeah, I can be I can be not not exactly cranky, just like little things bother me. Makes sense, right? Like, all right, like, you know, this hyena bone says I'm going to have a bad day. So I'm prepared for it. I've got my sort of box of, well, you know, I guess we didn't have chocolates at this point, but, you know, cacao pods or something to get me through it. Just saying I've got my box.

Everybody's like, a box? What's a box? What's going on? What's a box? It's got six sides. You hold it up and everyone starts chanting, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

And this is such a mind-bendingly ancient thing. Like, when did we start doing little marks to tally stuff? Probably 70,000 years ago. Hard to tell if we have evidence of the oldest or what. And this leads to a mini takeaway number one. Tally marks are probably the fourth counting system developed by humans. Yeah, okay. So I thought that there was like, I remember there being some weird early counting system that was like peas or something inside different crevices on a tablet.

I'm not remembering this right, but it confused me a lot. In Mesopotamia? Yeah, something like that. But yeah. But yeah, there's also, okay it confused me a lot. In Mesopotamia? Yeah, something like that. But yeah, there's also, okay, if I can guess other ones, can I guess what the other ones are? Yeah, and that Mesopotamian like balls inside a clay sphere is probably after tally marks, but we're talking about like extraordinarily simple ways of just marking and counting. Okay.

I'm going to say fingies. Is fingies one of them? Or 10 fingers? Yeah. That category. Yeah. Okay. Fingers, counting out loud and just hoping you remember it.

Is that one of them? Yeah. Yeah. That's the first one. Okay. Okay. Just like our minds and memories. Yeah.

It's our minds, our fingers, painting numbers on cats and trying to get them to stand in a certain order. That's my recent invention. I patented it. I'm very proud of it. That's what I do in my spare time. I feel like Watson and Bertie would be very good at that because they're very sweet, impatient cats. Aw. Well, they are.

Only one of them will stand still for it, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Birdie will be a secret number somewhere, and Watson will be in my lap being number one. She's an irrational number. And, yeah, the other way here is probably just shortly before tallies, people probably did knots and tying things. Oh, that makes sense. Especially natural fibers and cords and things. Yeah.

All right. So counting in your head or out loud, counting on your fingers, tying knots on a rope, and then a hyena bone calculator. tying knots on a rope, and then a hyena bone calculator. Yeah, those are going back many tens of thousands of years, our first four ways of counting anything at all. That's, yeah, I mean, it is wild to think about. There was a period of human history before we started counting stuff, probably. Yes, and especially in a way where we don't have physical evidence of it, because that first first way was definitely just using our minds and putting stuff in our head. And part of why we're confident that was first is that many animal species do that too. Yes. But without writing or marking anything. And we've studied that and know that.

or marking anything. And we've studied that and know that. Yeah, like we probably inherited or like the proto humans, the non-human primates that are our ancestors probably had some ability to do some mental calculus. But I don't think it's, I think there's like an idea that it's not exactly the same kind of counting as we do where we have like symbolic numbers, right? Like we've got like one, two, three, four, but more just like looking at a cluster of things. And then it's like, that looks like one object. That looks like three objects. That looks like five objects. Like we're decent at kind of recognizing clusters of objects. I think actually some of our primate relatives can be even better at just the rote memorization of clusters of objects than humans.

Cool. Which makes sense because we rely more on like a symbolic system and they can rely more on just this like snapshot memory of stuff. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. We've offloaded a lot of that. Yes. Tally's and other stuff. Yeah. Yeah. We've offloaded a lot of that to- Yes. Tally's and other stuff.

Yeah. Hyena bones. My husband's always whining about all these hyena bones I keep around and I'm telling him it's for our taxes. I need a blank bone 1040, please. Yeah. Can I? Yeah.

And I'm going to link another example of just animals counting. There's a piece for the New York Times Science section by Natalie Angier, where she talks about a study of guppies that showed they can quickly count schools of fish to try to join the larger one, or weaving spiders can count and remember how much prey they've stored. The Tungara frog is a Central American frog whose males make competing mating calls, where they take turns counting upwards in response to how many other frogs they hear. Counting is an ability many species on Earth do. Yes. Sometimes it's sort of like pattern recognition, volume recognition, cluster recognition. The frogs aren't going like one, croak, two, croak, three, croak. But they have some kind of pattern recognition. Some animals even have sort of a timing recognition like mice and rats can kind of time things like they can be like, okay, this is one, two, three seconds that I have to wait. Cool. They learn that they have to wait like a number

of seconds before they're able to proceed through a maze, but they can't see the visual cues that they have to wait. So like in order to learn, like they just like pause there for the amount of time that they need to wait without any kind of external thing counting that time for them. So they learn how to like, okay, this is the amount of time. They have some ability to keep track of like three seconds versus like five seconds. And I can't track time like that at all. I've just offloaded that skill to Klax and here I am being out counted by mice. Okay, cool. And then the second system in the order of us counting is using our human bodies. Oh, like the fingers.

Fingers are definitely a go-to and it's also influenced a lot of our language. There's a few studies by two evolutionary biologists, Mark Pagel and Andrew Mead of the University of Reading in the UK. They said that across the Indo-European language group, Bantu language group, and Austronesian language group, those languages tend to maintain the same words for small numbers, especially five or lower, for many thousands of years, up to 100,000 years. And they often derive that from body part words. Because we have been counting on our fingers that long and that consistently. I guess it's like, I find it strange that we didn't ever in English like number our fingers. I thought that would have happened because we have words for our fingers like index finger, middle finger, pinky, et cetera,

but we don't just call them like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Seems like we should. Yeah. Our recent middle finger episode could have just been called finger three or something. Yeah. And there's also slightly more complex ways of counting body parts than just fingers too. Toes? Not just toes either. In 1898, a team from Cambridge University went out to the Torres Strait Islands near Australia, and they discovered that communities there, peoples there, had developed a body part counting system going up to 19. Wow. Which did not use toes.

They used the 10 fingers and thumbs, two wrists, two elbows, two shoulders, two nipples, and one sternum, adding up to 19. I do like to say that the nipples are just the fingers of the chest. Yeah. And for these folks, it's what they like think of for, I guess, 17 and 18 counting up. It's fun. I don't know. That's a good idea. It's a good mnemonic device.

And then if you have a dog, you've got what? Like eight more? Eight more you can count. I don't remember how many nipples the dog has. I think it's eight. Kind of speaking of, since that's reproductive, there's also a study of the Yupno people of Papua New Guinea who have a more numerous body part framework, which includes the two testicles and one penis when a male person is counting. Because that's a part of the body. You can do it.

We talked about how, I think on the last episode about the middle finger, how that's supposed to look like a wiener and the testicles. But then we also use the wiener and the testicles like counting fingers. So, you know, I'm just saying. Yeah. Globally, people have noticed that a phallus and a finger are vaguely kind of a shape. They're both phalanges, all right? Yeah. But then suddenly there's a big difference if you go without your pants versus giving someone a thumbs up.

Different social connotation. Learn it. People really object to one versus the other. social connotation. Learn it. People really object to one versus the other. And this is all over language, all over thinking, and was just always available. And then the third system, which according to the evidence we found came only a little before tally marks, is tying knots into cords, also maybe making beads out of things. And one dig in a cave in modern Morocco found seashells that people decorated and pierced with holes about 82,000 years ago.

And we think that might have been strung together in a mathematical or counting way. Because a lot of the cords are gone, but there's such old chord and knot counting traditions in cultures like South American native people who make kweepu that we think that is probably slightly older than talies. So you've got your knotted chords, you got your abalone abacuses. Makes sense to me. Yeah. Right. It's kind of abacus thinking too. Yeah. Yeah. That same kind of way of doing things. I know an abacus is more complicated because you got different tens, you got the ones, and I think you got the hundreds. I've never learned how to use an abacus. That's what hyena bones are for. And then moving forward from prehistoric counting,

you know, tally marks are still with us. Like even as societies develop numbers, tallies continue to be a separate thing we use for quick, fast counting. And modern tallies are their own takeaway number two. The modern world has three dominant ways of drawing a set of five tally marks. In most of the countries this podcast is popular, there's a style of four vertical lines and then one diagonal line across it. But that's just one of three ways that millions and millions of people would draw that. Yeah, I mean, that's the one I know and love, the old prison tally. When I was a little kid, I didn't understand why you didn't just keep writing marks. I didn't understand why we had to break them up into fives, that it made it easier to kind of keep track of because you're like breaking it up into chunks. I'm like, why don't you just keep doing lines? Why do we have to switch it up? Yeah. But it gets really confusing once you do 100 of those. Exactly.

And nobody knows for sure, but it seems based on our five fingers plus thumb. And yeah, that's just where we demarcate a visual helper. And these other two methods also do a fifth visual helper and then move on. But in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, basically any British-influenced places plus many other European countries, they do that four bars and then a diagonal. But there's two other systems, and one of them is across France and Brazil and Spanish-speaking Latin America. So most of the Americas and France have a different system. And France, is it with baguette? Yeah, just the exact same shape, but bread's all piled, yeah.

Yeah, just little baguettes. And to do five tally marks, they start with a vertical line, but then lines two, three, and four are the other sides of a square. Oh, come on, guys. What? They draw a square out. Huh. And then the fifth tally is a diagonal line through the middle of the square. Huh.

Connecting two of the corners. It's different from what I grew up with, so I don't like it. And I think it's wrong. Yeah, basically equally valid, not even totally different. But boo. No, boo. I oppose. And yeah, and apparently globalization has spread the U.S.-Britain way a lot.

So I found a Reddit post affirming that most French people do this square thing and also they're familiar with the American thing, possibly partly because Reddit is so English language heavy, but it's a big thing there. And I also found a write-up of a variant of the French Latin American Brazilian way where you can tally 10. You do the first four tallies as dots in a square shape, and then five through eight are lines connecting them to make a square. Nine and 10 are two diagonal lines through the middle. Okay, yeah.

So that's kind of a feature. You can tally 10 in one shape. Yeah, that's neat. But it still doesn't, for me, have the visual impact of a cartoon where it's a guy with a bunch of tally marks on the wall because then you just got a guy with a bunch of squares on the wall.

Is that how those cartoons look like in French? Is that even a thing in French cartoons? Wow. Now I want to reread Tintin or something and check. I don't know if Belgium does it, but yeah. See what Poirot does. Yeah. Belgium, sound off on the Discord. Legitimately. I'm just curious. Yeah. We have people there. So those are two systems. And then the other system uses a character derived from East Asian scripts. There's a lot of ancient roots, particularly from China, of written language in China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan.

And it's coming from a character that in modern Mandarin is called Zheng. The pinyin is Z-H-E-N-G with a falling fourth tone on the letter E, Zheng. And the character's at least 3,000 years old in terms of its roots. And we'll just link a picture. I can't really describe it, but it's a character just drawn with five pretty straight lines. And so you can draw each stroke as a tally. And there's a specific order people do that tally in with this existing character. I see. Okay.

Is it like symmetrical? Or is it more kind of asymmetrical, like the line through the four marks? Maybe I'm hesitating too much to describe it. Here's the thing. You do a horizontal line, then a vertical line down from the middle, then a small horizontal line to the right, then a small vertical line beside all that, and then a bottom horizontal line connecting it all. I can see it. So you may not have a mental picture of that, but then a bottom horizontal line connecting it all. I can see it. So you may not have a mental picture of that, but it's all straight lines. You've painted a brain picture for me. Thank you, Alex.

Yeah, I should have gone for it in the first place. Yeah, yeah. But we'll have a picture linked to. And the other fun thing with it is characters have meaning. And the character Zhang is on its own or in combination. It has a lot of meanings such as right, proper, correct, straight, true. So also like verbally reading wise, this character that's used for tallies also has a vibe of order and structurelying correctness order in numbers and math. Yeah. I know a lot of people don't enjoy math, but, you know, doing some like tidy math, being able to find an answer that is mathematically represented. We even have sayings in English, right? Everything adds up, meaning a good thing.

Like it all adds up, like it all works out. So I think that there is a certain satisfaction, comforting thing. And that's interesting to me, given how math is such a, you know, I mean, animals can do very basic math, but sort of the more complex math is very much a human thing. Yeah. And truly comforting in its way. There is something about making your world make sense just by counting stuff. And then if you can tally mark it, you can offload it from your head and do other human thoughts with it. Yeah. Like what's for lunch or something. And then I just see a bunch of numbers waft in front of me like I'm a genius. And then I'm like, grilled cheese.

I'm in my lunch palace. And then your mind fills with melting cheese. BBC Sherlock thing. And I'm just like, bread over cheese divided by pan. over cheese divided by pan. The next takeaway is more math and in a really wonderful way, I think, because takeaway number three. A lot of humanity's first amazing mathematical leaps

use numbers that are pretty directly derived from tally marks. This is two big examples of a thing that is hard to exactly pin down in some cultures, but a lot of the first numbers, especially like the number one in Arabic numerals, are clearly rooted in tallies. And people, once they started to assemble tallies into slightly more numerical structures, they could do amazing math all of a sudden. It was like getting a new technology or computer.

One example here is in China. The other is from Babylon. Because about 4,000 years ago, it's a tablet that's from 1,800 BC. see. We found a tablet from 4,000 years ago that has a whole set of math equations on it, including the Pythagorean theorem for right triangles. But then the tablet is written in cuneiform, and it's written with numbers. Right. So we're not talking about an iPad here, kids. There's no games on this tablet. Yeah, this isn't an advertisement from Microsoft Surface. I know you were thinking that, kids. You love various brands of tablets. This is like a Zune or something.

And yeah, in Cuneiform, especially in numbers, it started out as writing whole numbers by doing increasing sets of arrangements of just one wedge shape. So it's more elaborate than tallies, but there's a tally origin there. You're doing one mark over and over again to build up sums. And we don't have a time or place for when the leap from tallies to cuneiform happens. But we know that one of the oldest tablets we have is packed with amazing math in a way that might have led the world. changed a lot between then and now. Human beings have always been essentially the same, like capable of being really smart, like creating these complex mathematical equations and math and accounting and stuff, or writing customer complaints because of the poor quality of copper ingots. Yeah. And a while back on our truffles episode,

there was a first recorded mention of truffles, which was a lord complaining about not being given good enough truffles. Yeah. No, we're not kidding about the customer complaints. These are found on ancient cuneiform tablets. Everybody's mad on a lot of it. And so mad they carved it. That I can, I can do a Google review while I'm pooping, but, but carving it, you know. There was one that was like, this is not a bit, like there was a sarcastic review of like this guy's copper that was like, oh, your copper was so good. But it, and then he was like, it was not, it was not good. Just like cuneiform SpongeBob in a chicken shape with his beak and arms up. Exactly. Cuneiform memes. We were just always the same. Even before the internet, we had internet message boards, but interclay, I don't know, tablets.

Inner clay, I don't know. Tablets. This other story of amazing math is the literal sense of computing. It's truly astonishing. And in ancient China, according to a few sources, one of them is Frank J. Swatz of Penn State University. Ancient China developed a system called counting rods. And it's definitely numerical, but it's such a clear tallies origin because the rods were all just small rods. They were first made of bamboo, then people made like a nice set of jade or bones or other rods. But China scholars developed a way where they could

write the numbers one through nine in simple arrangements of rods that pretty much look like tallies. You even start with them all one parallel direction and then go perpendicular for higher numbers. It's interesting. So there were bamboo rods or jade rods. Were there any Serlings. His name's Rod Serling. Yeah, but that's such a perfect callback. Wow. I'm in the callback zone now. This is great.

We're in the callback zone. So like how many of these rods would you need sort of to make like would you have hundreds of rods or just like 10 rods and then kind of arrange them in a way that did the counting? Good question. You pretty much need up to nine rods for each digit because the other element of this was a big board that you lay the rods on. Ah, okay. And the board has squared off different areas for different decimal places and different digits. Okay. So this is sort of like a version of the like peas in the divots kind of counting that confuses me so much. Yeah.

No, I got it. It's like an abacus, but with rods and a board. Yeah, like laying rods on a flat board across your floor on a table. Right. And so they could make any number just with rods for each digit of one through nine. And then you have zero just by leaving a space empty, you know. And so they developed this in the warring states period more than 2,000 years ago. And they did all sorts of advanced base 10 math with that.

As early as the 500s AD, they calculated the value of pi to an accurate value of 3.1415926. Those are all accurate digits for it. Man, nerds have been around for such a long time. You got to respect it. I mean, it's amazing that as soon as we basically have the tools to do math and store information, right? Because the rods are a way to store information, right? You're storing numbers with these rods. Then we just start to go completely book wild with higher order math, more complex calculations. It's very impressive. Yes. Yeah. It's like putting something derived from tallies into an analog version of a computer, like a PC. And that tool was the whole difference. People in China had pi out to seven decimal digits by the 500s AD. And apparently that's more than a thousand years before people in Europe could do that because they hadn't come up with this tool.

It's just like a very low bit early computer. early computer. You are essentially storing things in these like very tiny on-off positions, you know, on this computer parts, which I don't know the name of.

Just super expert voice from me. Gizmos. Gizmos. Yes. Widgets. Waggles glasses. Thingamabobber. Boy, a lot of computer science from me. We should take a break and let it rest.

And you can also see those tally marks if you want to. We will take a quick break, then return to run the European economy and burn down parliaments. So stick around. Yay, finally. That was Guy Fawkes cheering back there. Folks, as you know, this podcast exists because of listener support. Member support, please go to MaximumFun.org slash join if you want to get to take pride in this being a show and being a thing. The research, the editing, the effort, the perspective, the care that we try to do every

week. We need your help. And the folks who already help are doing something amazing. So thank you to every single one of you who's already a member. In addition to that, to stretch out that support a little bit more, we have support from a company that I am thrilled about because I am eating their food kind of all the time. Company's called Wild Grain. They are makers of the first ever Bake From Frozen subscription box for sourdough breads, fresh pastas, and artisanal pastries. The three best foods,

sourdough breads, fresh pastas, artisanal pastries. The three best foods, sourdough breads, fresh pastas, artisanal pastries. My most recent box had a surprise of chocolate croissants. And think about it. Regular croissants, great. Chocolate croissants, even better than the sum of those parts. You can't beat it. I just stuck that in the oven in less than 25 minutes. I had fresh, oven in less than 25 minutes, I had fresh, hot, like it's from a bakery, chocolate croissants in my home. Right? The aromas, the flavors, the tastes, and the convenience. I did not need to change into going outside clothes. I was dressed and stuff, but it was raining. Didn't want to. Anyway, what you need to know is that for a limited time, you can get $30 off the first box plus free croissants in every box when you go to wildgrain.com slash SifPod

to start your subscription. You heard me right. Free croissants in every box and $30 off your first box when you go to wildgrain.com slash SifPod. That's wildgrain.com slash SifPod or you can use promo code SifPod at checkout. I'm Jesse Thorne.

I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney.

I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience, one you have no choice but to embrace, because, yes, listening is mandatory.

The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. And we are back and with two more takeaways for this tally mark episode, because I have wetted a cloth with oil and set it afire. If that was a long break, we were talking about burning down parliament, if you don't remember. If you don't remember, I'm getting excited for some pyrotechnics over here. Yeah, that'll be the last one.

In the meantime, takeaway number four. Yeah, that'll be the last one. In the meantime, takeaway number four. Tally marks were Europe's most secure way of doing major economic transactions for several recent centuries. In recent times, from the 1100s all the way into the 1800s. That seems too late because we had like numbers by then. Yes, we had numbers. We had money. We had central governments in a lot of European places. And because of, in particular, an innovation in England, people depended on tallies on wooden sticks for a lot of big transactions and then for the record keeping afterward too.

transactions and then for the record keeping afterward too. Why would we do that when we had seemingly better things to store numbers with like napkins or notebooks? The two things I write most things on, unfortunately. But yes, it's a good question. And there was some logic to it, it turns out. The innovation was a split tally stick. And this was for especially lending and borrowing. So not so much a math device, more of a banking device. Here are the London Science Museum, also the YouTube channel of the University of London, and an essay by professors Larry Crumbly and Nicholas Apostolou of Louisiana State University. Yeah, because Europe definitely had coins, paper money, kings, systems. But a lot of their big transactions, especially borrowing or lending, they would take a long wooden stick, do a bunch of tallies and notation on it, carve in the amount of money being lent, the date of the transaction who's involved.

And then the useful part is you split it in half. So then both people have a wooden stick with a bunch of tallies that lists this transaction and both of them have a solid record of it. And the especially killer element is that it's very hard to counterfeit because the tallies need to match up precisely. And the wood grain is like a watermark, right? If it's different trees, you can tell. The wood grain. It always comes down to the wood grain,lex um as an amateur carpenter as in i once took a coffee table from a flea market and refinished it which does make me a carpenter i believe um wood grain is wood grain wood grain is like the thumbprint of the tree.

It is. It's what we had before the very, very little tiny marks on modern, modern paper money. Yeah. Yeah. Was wood, which I guess is the origin of paper money, too. So there you go. Yeah, it always interesting because there is some influence of trying to recreate sort of the special randomness or not randomness, but the incredible precision that can exist in nature. have these scales on their wings and each of these scales have microstructures that creates structural coloration, which gives morpho butterflies and other butterflies that really

bright, shiny, luminescent look. And there's this concept, it has not really been put into effect as far as I know, but this concept that you could create structural coloration similar to butterfly wings on paper money to make it really hard to counterfeit. Similar to nature, not literally using real butterfly wings, but like creating artificial, you know, butterfly scales on money so that it's just really difficult to, for counterfeiters to recreate. Wow. And it sounds beautiful too. Yeah. I mean, I imagine they're not going to, I wish, like, I don't think they're just going to make fairy money, right? Where it looks like a butterfly wing with like a five on it, but that would be sick. I'd love, I want fairy money, you know? Yeah. I'll buy potions.

Like acorn caps and butterfly wings. Yeah, I'll trade it with the badger who protects Redwall and stuff. It's going to be great. Yeah, we'll get some of that great dandelion wine. And God, that man loved his animal feasts, the guy who wrote the Redwall series. Brian Jack. Yeah, he's great. the guy who wrote the Redwall series.

Brian Jack. Yeah, he's great. Yeah. For our younger listeners, Redwall was a series about animals like mice and rabbits and badgers. And they had these incredible bloody wars. These were children's books. There was a lot. There was an arrow that like went through like some kind of mole's throat at a point but on the other hand they also had like many pages devoted to describing extremely delicious feasts he all but wrote out

recipes for things like dandelion wine and other stuff that he imagined that these rodents would have at a feast um so that's that's that that's that thing. But the tally stick, I do like that. That's interesting. So yeah, you'd need to match up. So the thing preventing one party from altering their stick half would just be that it would no longer make sense when you match it up with the other stick half? Yeah, yeah. Tally is basically in alignment with the deal itself. And like when you break wood in half, every little splinter is interesting. It was a not totally perfect system. I'm sure there's ways you can beat it or just invent half a stick and lie really well. But it was better than every other option they had. And so people

used it. Seems pretty good. It's like as soon as when someone starts talking to me about the blockchain, I'm going to start talking about the stick rod. Yeah, because they also had regular money, but they mostly used it for regular things. And so these were particularly early for like buying land or buying pieces of a company or like big stuff. Or like a big deal so that if you tried to do it with money, there could be like a security risk. Yes, exactly. Yeah. You didn't have to carry so much cash. You could just bring a stick and curve it up. Right. Really thwarting the Robin Hood sort of situation instead of being like a nobleman trotting slowly on your horse through the woods going like, I sure hope no guy in tights steals

my big bag of heavy coins. Right. Yeah. All those stagecoach robberies in the old sense are so silly in that way. Yeah. Yeah. Because like then Robin is like, oh, this is a bunch of sticks. I can't feed the poor sticks. I'm already in Sherwood Forest. I have all the sticks I want. If I wanted sticks, I would just be in the forest still. Reach a handout. Reach a handout.

And no joke, part of the origin of tally sticks is Britain and particularly London. Because for one thing, there were a lot of willow trees near the banks of the River Thames, which was also near financial centers. And willow is easy to carve and split. It's kind of a soft wood. Not as easy as hyena bone, but go on. Right. They also lacked hyenas. Yeah, not enough hyenas in London.

Yeah, yeah. And then, yeah, the court of King Henry I, son of William the Conqueror, was the first to do these in the world. And as they developed it, they also changed the language because when people split a tally stick into the borrower received a half that's called the foil, and then the lender received a half that they called the stock. Because stock is like a wood term, you know? Oh, hey, and then we call it a stock market. Yeah. Because it's where people hit each other with sticks. Buy, buy, buy, and he's whacking with each word buy, you know? The Leafman brothers, get it? Leafman brothers.

Oh, those guys. It's fun to laugh about them, you know? Anyway. It's fun to picked up the technique. Apparently, there's legal systems in faraway places like Sweden and Finland that had laws about them as late as the 1700s. And the early 1800s, French legal system called the Napoleonic Code. It mentions tally sticks as like a normal form of documenting money and doing business. Like Napoleon's system said, yeah, stick with tally marks. That makes sense.

Yeah. That's legal. Yeah, it was baguettes, and they did use them to line up the unique grain of the baguette to the other side of the baguette. I shouldn't have transacted business hungry. I ate our house. I ate the new tour. Oh Chalet. This was just a surprisingly common and consistent thing in Europe's economy. And Britain only started to move away from it in the 1820s. There were also already people writing major transactions on paper and in other ways too, but tally sticks

were so effective and so traditional to so many people that they kept doing that until about 200 years ago. I mean, it kind of makes sense. I don't think it's like, it's not as if our modern system is foolproof. Lots of people get scammed. There's a lot of like, you know, sort of bank fraud and stuff. So I don't know that we've necessarily created a more secure system than these sticks. Maybe a more efficient one, though. Exactly. Yeah. And no system's totally perfect.

And this had a lot going for it. And it was like even like cheap. You can just get a stick. Yeah. Anyone. I can get a stick for you. You want a stick? I can get you a stick by 5.30.

Use code SIFTPOD for 15% off sticks from me. Just say that to me as I give you a stick. Yeah. I'll give you a bigger stick. Like, what's the code word? Cifpod? All right, here's a stick. Here's a better stick, yeah.

Little known fact, we are beavers. North American beavers. Yeah, have we never mentioned that across many episodes? Actually, Alex is a North American beaver. I'm a Eurasian beaver. That's right. Oh, good canon. Anyway, but this tally stick thing, it leads into the last takeaway of the main show.

Because takeaway number five. When the UK tried to end their tally stick system. They accidentally burned down Parliament. Oh, did they put all the sticks? Did they put all the sticks like under Parliament in sort of a bonfire situation? And then they're like, and now we burn all these sticks. And then it made a big bonfire. They're like, oh, yes, the Parliament building is also made out of wood. That's almost what happened, yeah.

Nice. I knew it. Yeah, this is in the year 1834. And if you see parliaments on TV, people arguing in the chambers or most of the outside of the Palace of Westminster, that building, a lot of it was built after 1834 because they burned it down in this story. Yeah. So what happened? In the 1830s, Britain is a global empire, but also a bunch of ancient systems. And in the 1820s, 1826 specifically, they pass a law saying no more new tally sticks and we need to transition this. We need to start doing paper records and stuff. But a lot of the tally sticks were still laying around, particularly due to the chancellor of the exchequer and the financial part of the British government.

And in 1834, they had a lot of cartloads of physical sticks in the basement of parliaments. And some of them were as old as the 1200s, like a lot of very not a transaction anymore sticks. And some janitor angry at all the sticks was like, darn you sticks, I'm going to rub you vigorously together to teach you a lesson. Right. I will friction these away. Oh, it's going to rub you vigorously together to teach you a lesson. Right. I will friction these away. Oh, it's going to take forever. Yes.

But what happened is October 16th, 1834, the exchequer tells their clerk to tell workmen to burn the sticks. Oh. And so two workmen do this. While they're still under parliament? Yeah. So their thinking was, there's a stove right here. Okay. So it is, Alex, that's exactly the thing that I said that as a joke.

Like, obviously they wouldn't be so dumb as to set all the sticks on fire underneath the parliament building. Right. Okay. But they did do exactly that, though. Yeah, and the one part that I guess was more obvious in the past when people did their own home heating is you're not supposed to put wood into coal stoves. At least a lot of wood, that's a fire risk, apparently. I don't really deal with coal stoves. I wouldn't know. Well, coal burns more slowly than wood, but it is a major energy source. So I guess if you put

a bunch of wood in something where coal is burning, you have something that can burn fast and something that can burn slow. And so maybe that's bad together. I don't know. That's just a guess. I'm not a fire scientist. It's that general thing. Like, it's not designed to burn wood, and it's a fire risk. It's designed differently for coal. And there were two underfloor coal stoves that provided heat for the House of Lords chamber. And these workmen shoved...

Which still exists, by the way. They still call it that. Yeah, it's modern empire antique systems, you know? Yeah. And so in this day in October 1834, the guys start just shoveling the wood sticks into the two coal stoves directly under the House of Lords. As they do this, the deputy housekeeper of the House of Lords says, hey, I see smoke coming through the floor.

Oh, interesting. I also noticed that the floor is getting hot. Oh, I'm sure it's nothing. And so this lady housekeeper says, hey, guys, I've noticed these things. And these guys ignore her. They're like, sure, it's some lady, whatever. Yeah. Oh, okay, okay.

Again, I make a joke, and it turns out that is exactly what they did. Right. Like they had warning. Yeah. And they finished dumping the sticks in the stoves. They go home for the night. And that night, most of the building burns down. Yeah. It's literally the dog in the burning room meme that was pretty hot for a while. Yes. But it's an old British parliament guy. Yeah, he has that big barrister wig. That's great. Yeah. And he's drinking tea instead of coffee.

If any of you guys are artistically enabled and you have time, just a suggestion for a new meme there. Unable and you have time. Just a suggestion for a new meme there. tally system of running our economy and like a curse happened or something and the building burned down divine intervention in favor of tally sticks yeah the curse was that they set a bunch of burnable things on fire underneath another thing that could burn and then when someone was like it seems like it's burning they're like like, all right, whatever, loser. And then, you know, just let it happen. But what if I'm very superstitious and want to blame the angels, you know? What about that?

The angels, like, shot down a stupid ray that made everyone dumb that night. Right, right. Stupid ray. Yeah, yeah. Low from above, a stupid ray that made everyone dumb that night. Right, right. Stupid ray. Yeah, yeah. Low from above, a stupid ray. Be not afraid, but be very stupid. Okay, shovel, shovel, shovel, shovel. Folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro, with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode,

with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, tally marks are probably the fourth counting system ever developed by humans. Takeaway number two, the modern world has three dominant ways of drawing a set of five tally marks. Takeaway number three, a lot of humanity's first amazing mathematical leaps used numbers pretty directly derived from tally marks. Takeaway number four, tally marks were Europe's most secure way of doing major economic transactions for several recent centuries. And takeaway number five, when the UK tried to dispose of their tally sticks, they accidentally burned down Parliament. And a lot of stats and numbers before and during those. Also, I'm just glad we could do five takeaways for five tally marks. Fun thing. Lil Easter egg.

Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly, incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is amazing uses of tally stick style economic promises to get through crises in China and Ireland. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than 16 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of MaxFun bonus shows. It's special audio. It is just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation.

Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include many books. I don't think I name-checked them all. One of them is The Math Book from Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics. That's by science writer Clifford A. Pickover. Also, Empire of the Sum by journalist Keith Houston. How Mathematics Happened, by physicist Peter S. Rudman. We also used the recent hyena bone find in 2021 by archaeologist Francesco d'Erico of the University of Bordeaux, language studies by evolutionary biologists Mark Pagel and Andrew Mead of the University of Reading, and digital resources from places like Penn State University and the London

Science Museum. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skadigok people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join that Discord.

We're also talking about this episode on the Discord. And hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 116. That's about the topic of barbed wire. Fun fact, there's a science called fence ecology, and fence ecologists use everything from observation to satellite images to manage barbed wire across continents. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band.

Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members, and thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating, So How About That? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported

directly by you.