Did Money Really Begin With Barter? (Money Episode Short)

Adam Smith wrote in 1776 about a human "propensity to truck, barter, and exchange," and textbooks built a whole origin story on it. Anthropologists went looking for that barter village and never found it. David Graeber found that neighbors ran on credit, and that swapping mostly happened between strangers. The full story is the money episode of What Comes Next.