Professor David Graeber, anthropologist and author of “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” discussing the history of money and credit. The economics profession tends to teach that money arose from barter. However, anthropologists have been searching for 200 years and found absolutely no evidence for this.
Instead, it seems that early human societies were had reciprocal gift exchange, whereby one person would gift something to their neighbor, and that person would be tacitly indebted for something of similar quality.
Barter has only been observed between groups that didn’t frequently come into contact, and sometimes between outright enemies, or among people that are already used to money but for some reason have no access to it.
Watch the whole talk here: https://youtu.be/CZIINXhGDcs