Everything You Know About the Origin of Money Is Wrong

Everything your textbook said about the origin of money is probably wrong. Barter? Nobody has ever found a society that ran on it. So where did money really come from? 🥚🪵 Winter, 300,000 years ago. You have the perfect stone blade. Your neighbor has meat. He doesn't need a blade. So what do you do? In this animated story you'll follow money from a single notch on a stick by the fire, to shell beads in a South African cave, clay tokens in Mesopotamia, silver weighed on temple scales, giant stone money on the island of Yap (one of them at the bottom of the sea!), the first coins of Lydia, Song-dynasty paper money... all the way to the numbers on your phone. And somewhere along the way, you'll face a choice: more silver than you've ever held... or one hungry neighbor. ⏱ Chapters 0:00 Winter, 300,000 years ago 0:39 The barter story everyone learns 1:11 Anthropologists looked everywhere 1:28 Adam Smith and the "double coincidence of wants" 1:57 Buying lunch with a goat 2:09 They remembered: life in a small band 2:39 "You owe me one" - the first money 3:05 Strangers and 90 km of obsidian 3:44 Shell beads: value we agree on 4:21 Farming, towns and clay tokens 5:02 Debts become writing 5:22 Temples, barley wages and silver by weight 5:57 The famine: silver or a promise? 7:11 Cowrie shells in ancient China 7:28 The stone money of Yap 8:04 Lydia and the first coins 8:37 Paper money and printing too much 9:15 Money today: just numbers 9:50 It was always about trust 💬 What would YOU use as money if the world started over tomorrow? Shells? Stones? Snacks? Tell us in the comments. 👍 And if you'd give your neighbor that barley too, hit like and subscribe. It's free. We checked. 📚 Sources & further reading Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776) W. S. Jevons, Money and the Mechanism of Exchange (1875) Caroline Humphrey, "Barter and Economic Disintegration" (1985) Brooks et al., Olorgesailie obsidian transport, Science (2018) Henshilwood et al., Blombos Cave shell beads, Science (2004) Denise Schmandt-Besserat, Before Writing (1992) Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, "Money creation in the modern economy" (2014) #historyofmoney #whatif #barter #animation