Rose Eveleth — writer, producer, and “Flash Forward” podcast host — explains why futurists don’t need to know the future. Then, you’ll learn about the oldest examples of money ever discovered.
Rose Eveleth — writer, producer, and “Flash Forward” podcast host — explains why futurists don’t need to know the future. Then, you’ll learn about the oldest examples of money ever discovered.
Additional resources from Rose Eveleth:
Money may have been invented as long as 5,000 years ago by Grant Currin
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/why-futurists-dont-need-to-know-the-future-w-flash-forward-host-rose-eveleth
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about why futurists don’t need to know the future, with writer, producer, and “Flash Forward” podcast host Rose Eveleth. Then, you’ll learn about the oldest examples of money ever discovered.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
What if you could take a peek into the future to know what decisions you should make in the present? That's basically the job of a futurist: they explore what might happen in the future and the things we can do today to make that future better. And our guest today is going to answer our burning questions about futurists and how they do what they do. Rose Eveleth is a writer, producer, and the creator of Flash Forward Presents, a podcast network that demystifies the future, featuring hit shows like Flash Forward and Advice For And From The Future. In our conversation, I asked her a question I've always wondered about. Have a listen.
[CLIP 5:15]
PS: Rose mentioned UBI, and that stands for "universal basic income," or the idea of regularly giving everyone in a population a certain amount of money, no questions asked. Anyway, that was Rose Eveleth, a writer, producer, and the creator of Flash Forward Presents, a podcast network that demystifies the future, featuring hit shows like Flash Forward and Advice For And From The Future. Rose will be back tomorrow to talk about why so many breakthroughs in technology never seem to go anywhere.
If you found ancient money, how would you know it was ancient money? You probably couldn’t read the inscriptions. You could check to see if it was made of precious metal, but that wouldn’t necessarily make it money. Well, a pair of Dutch archaeologists just faced that quandary — and their ingenious solution led them to conclude that they had the oldest examples of money ever discovered.
Over the decades, archaeologists have dug up a lot of very old, very oxidized pieces of bronze. We’re talking tiny axe blades, rings, and pieces they call “ribs” but that really look like metal green beans. These things have been found all over Europe, though the rings and beans are more plentiful in Southern Europe and the axe blades are more plentiful in Northern Europe. But there’s a central location around the Czech Republic where all three tend to converge.
How can this rag-tag collection of bronze objects belong to the same system of money? It comes down to weight. One key aspect of currency is that any one piece of it is interchangeable with another piece of the same value. When money is made of a precious material, like bronze, its value is the amount of material itself. And you can measure that by weight.
That’s why the researchers behind this project decided to weigh 5,000 pieces of this bronze-age bling. That wasn’t as simple as you’d think. After all, people living 5,000 years ago didn’t have great ways to measure things. To get into their heads, the researchers used insights from psychophysics. That’s a subfield of cognitive psychology that compares the physical properties of things with the way humans perceive them.
In this case, they needed to figure out how much people in the Bronze Age thought those pieces weighed. Researchers in psychophysics have found that people usually think two objects weigh the same if they fall within about a 10 percent range.
The idea is that if Bronze-age people were making a lot of objects that they thought were equivalent, then those objects were probably used as a currency. And what they found lined up with that expectation: many of the bronze objects found across Europe would have seemed equivalent to Bronze-age people. More than 70 percent of the bronze rings fell into that 10 percent range, and even more of the green beans did. The axe blades didn’t quite measure up, but their weight similarity was still slightly higher than chance.
5,000 years! Now that’s some old money. If only future archaeologists could find our cryptocurrency.
Let’s recap the main things we learned today
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Ashley Hamer and Grant Currin, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Curiosity Daily is produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Join us again tomorrow and you’ll learn something new in just a few minutes. And yeah, we’ll put our money where our mouth is. Mouths are?
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!