Margen
Here's how school told it: first people swapped hens for sandals, that got messy, and someone invented coins. The problem is that Adam Smith told that story in 1776 without a shred of evidence, and anthropologists have been searching ever since for a society that actually ran on pure barter. They have found none. Not one.
What they have found everywhere is something else: debts and favours. In small communities nobody traded a cow for three axes on the spot; you took the axe and owed one, and the community kept score. Money wasn't born to replace barter — it was born to measure and move those debts.
And real barter? It exists, but the other way round from the tale: it shows up after money, when money fails. In prisons, in wars, in crises. It isn't our distant past. It's our plan B.