While it is true that trade is evident from ancient times, with goods found at burial sites that originated thousands of miles away, this does not automatically imply that all trade was facilitated by a commoditized asset serving as a universal medium of exchange. In many cases, goods like salt, furs, and metal objects were indeed used in trade, but they were part of a broader system of barter and reciprocal exchange, which could function effectively without a standardized form of money.

Regarding the role of social relationships in finance, while it's accurate that relationships remain crucial, especially for large transactions in modern times, this does not discount the fact that in the past, community trust and social bonds were often the primary means of securing credit, not collateral or commoditized money. This is evident in how competitive markets and the scarcity of trust can affect transactions, as Graeber notes through an anecdote where mutual aid within a community was a given, not a transaction requiring formal repayment.

The idea of a pre-commercial time where 'people didn't care about money' may indeed be fictional, but it's more nuanced than simply saying they used money in the way we do now. They cared about value and exchange, but these were frequently managed through social mechanisms rather than through impersonal, commoditized money. It's essential to understand that the concept of money has evolved and that early forms of trade and credit were valid economic systems in their own right, even if they don't match the monetary systems we are familiar with today.

I strongly recommend David Graeber's "Debt: The first 5000 years", which is an anthropological account of the changing role of debt and money around the world over history

Long distance trade and traveling merchants date back into the Bronze Age at least, and salt was probably traded in Europe during the Stone Age.

These transactions did not use money, but their basics do not differ much from contemporary trade - including the fact that trade centers and highly connected individuals could become very, very rich, almost unfathomably so when compared to their contemporaries.

It depends on how you define money. Coins didn't really exist until the 7th century BC, that doesn't mean long-range widescale trade did not exist prior to that for 1000+ years but they didn't generally use money (in the way we would understand it at least) so the boundary between using money and barter wasn't really that clear.

To put it simply, early credit relationships were dominantly exchanges of services. So it wasn't barter, it's that you would do something for someone with the expectation that they would do something for you.

There, no media of exchange, and no barter. Solved. That's what you get for projecting definitions backwards through time :)

Now for the first time, I'm not sure how that is controversial, if you read that historically debt was a tool of bondage, then it makes perfect sense to frame the power of bondage as a social ill.

Lots of evidence for lending & borrowing though (debt).

The a-historical account is that money was developed to make barter more efficient. This is not what we see in the records from Sumer, and there is similar evidence in the other locations where we know writing arose. Before the neolithic revolution societies economic structure was largely based on social ties and a sense of reciprocal behavior: a sort of informal communism. As sedentary agriculture lead to the development of temple complexes and cities, debt and credit records replaced these. Money was not developed until nearly 2k years later. Barter was actually uncommon in the ancient world and was typically reserved for interactions between strangers such as traders that had traveled long distance and had no social ties to one another. Coinage in particular typically arose as part of a complex that involved raising armies and funding them via taxation.

The commodity theory of money is a-historical, and not what "original money" was.

It's a great book, though Graeber has little restraint in taking pot shots at economists, which might provoke some readers to defensiveness.

Still, even the barter economy was used for mostly "optional" activities. People were not dependent on it for survival, a tribe could live just fine on their own, without trade.

In short, while bartering likely did exist in some forms, it was not the primary means of commerce. Within a tribe or group of people, a 'gift economy' was generally used. This makes sense, as an average pre-historic tribe had like 50 people, making a complicated economic system unnecessary.

When civilization started to form, primitive forms of money came along with it. There was never a time when you went to the market with a handful of wheat and some furs, and hoped to trade them for some salt and fruit. That idea was popularized by Adam Smith in the 1700s, who was an economist, not an anthropologist.

I encourage anyone interested in the topic of the origins of money to read "Debt the First 5,000 Years" by David Graeber.

AFAICT there is wide consensus among anthropologists that forms of "money" existed far in human prehistory, and barter was never common in early cultures.