The Origins of Barter

No one has been able to locate a part of the world where economic transaction between neighbors takes the form of, i'll give you 20 chickens for that cow. The definitive anthropological work on barter by caroline humphrey of cambridge could not be more definitive in its conclusions. No xample of a barter economy pure and simple has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money. All available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.