Tally stick

The tally stick is counting made physical—the recognition that notches carved into bone or wood could represent quantities beyond what memory could reliably hold. This technology, seemingly primitive, established the principle underlying all data storage: information persists in marks on material.

At Border Cave in South Africa, the Lebombo bone—a baboon fibula with 29 notches—dates to approximately 42,000 years ago. Whether it recorded lunar cycles, menstrual cycles, or something else entirely, the notches prove their maker understood symbolic notation. Each mark meant something; the sequence meant more. External memory had been invented.

The adjacent possible for tally sticks required bone-working tools capable of precise incision and the conceptual breakthrough that marks could represent things not present. Stone tools existed for millions of years before tally sticks appeared, suggesting the delay was cognitive rather than technical. Symbolic thinking—the ability to treat one thing as standing for another—was the limiting factor.

The Ishango bone from Congo, dated to 20,000 years ago, shows sophistication beyond simple counting. Its notch patterns suggest mathematical operations: prime number sequences, doubling patterns, possibly menstrual or lunar calendars. These weren't random marks but organized information, the first evidence of mathematical thinking preserved in material form.

Tally sticks proved remarkably durable as technology. The British Exchequer used split tally sticks for tax records until 1826—a 44,000-year technological continuity. The simplicity was feature, not bug: tallies couldn't be forged without detection, couldn't be misread, didn't require literacy. When the Exchequer burned its accumulated tallies in 1834, the fire spread and destroyed the Palace of Westminster.

The cascade from tally sticks leads to all symbolic notation. The insight that marks can record quantities evolved into writing, mathematics, programming. Every database, every spreadsheet, every blockchain traces conceptual ancestry to whoever first carved a notch in bone to remember a number.

By 2026, we store information in magnetic orientations and quantum states. But the principle remains unchanged from Border Cave: meaning persists in marks on material, outlasting the minds that created them.