Tony Talks History
How Ancient Humans Did Business
Everyone learned the same story at school: cavemen swapped goats for pots, got fed up, and invented money. The people who study early humans say it never happened.
So how did humans get what they needed for hundreds of thousands of years with no money at all? Gifts, memory and debt. Then clay tokens, a 5,000 year old accountant called Kushim, bar tabs in ancient Babylon, kings who wiped out everyone's debts, the first coins, stone money at the bottom of the sea, and a pile of wooden sticks that burned down the Houses of Parliament.
The numbers in this video
142,000The youngest possible age, in years, of 33 shell beads found in a cave in Morocco. They are between 142,000 and 150,000 years old, the oldest known.Source: Leakey Foundation / Science Advances 2021
9,500About how many years ago people in the Near East started making small clay tokens to keep score.Source: Denise Schmandt-Besserat, UT Austin
20%The most a lender could charge on a loan of silver under Hammurabi's laws. On a loan of grain it was up to 33 and a third percent.Source: Code of Hammurabi law 88 (Hanover College excerpt)
3.6mThe width of the biggest rai stone still standing on Yap. It weighs about four tonnes.Source: Wikipedia, Rai stones
700 yearsAbout how long the English government kept track of money with tally sticks.Source: Wikipedia, Burning of Parliament; Tally stick
3%About this much of the money in Britain is notes and coins, according to the Bank of England. The rest is records.Source: Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin 2014 Q1, "Money creation in the modern economy"
Every number has a source
Chapters
- 0:00The Goat Myth
- 1:32Adam Smith's Story
- 3:37Gifts, Not Swaps
- 5:44Silent Trade
- 7:23Clay and Kushim
- 9:23The First Bar Tab
- 11:16Debt Wiped Clean
- 12:48The First Coins
- 14:11Stone Money
- 15:57Burning Sticks
- 17:53Your Bank Card
What we left out
Claims we found and could not stand behind, so they are not in the video.
How much barley is on Kushim's tablet. Sources disagree on the figure (28,086 or 29,086 measures), so the video only says a huge amount, over thirty seven months.
What a shekel of silver weighed. It varied, so no figure in grams is given.
Distances or numbers for the hxaro gift networks of the Kalahari. Only a general description is given, on purpose.
