Honestly, using base 10 for everything is actually super recent in historical terms.
For a lot of things throughout history going back the babylonians, things were base 60, the babylonians were base 24, and a lot of stuff in English history is based around these as well, which is why you'd have "sixpence" -- their entire money system was base 240 or something nuts like that. So the idea that other cultures would set up their number naming conventions on another base than 10 then look strange because of it isn't so insane.
We use base 60 more in our lives than you think -- 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours (which is divisible by 60) in a day, 360 degrees in a circle.
If you think about it, it makes some sense -- in a world before calculators, having a base that can be divided in many ways without getting into long division would be quite efficient, even if it doesn't match our number of fingers (or the number system we're using)
For a lot of things throughout history going back the babylonians, things were base 60, the babylonians were base 24, and a lot of stuff in English history is based around these as well, which is why you'd have "sixpence" -- their entire money system was base 240 or something nuts like that. So the idea that other cultures would set up their number naming conventions on another base than 10 then look strange because of it isn't so insane.
We use base 60 more in our lives than you think -- 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours (which is divisible by 60) in a day, 360 degrees in a circle.
If you think about it, it makes some sense -- in a world before calculators, having a base that can be divided in many ways without getting into long division would be quite efficient, even if it doesn't match our number of fingers (or the number system we're using)
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In many ways I could believe it. We've got some really incredible technology which makes us look back and think they were idiots, but besides being required to do math in their heads every day due to lack of digital calculators to do it for them, it seems clear there was a lot more mythology passed between generations from storytelling, and once the printing press arrived, reading was considered a major past-time, and of long books most people would never look at in between tweets today. Writers in genres like history were rock stars in a way that would seem absurd today.