Something I’ve found interesting when digging into the earliest histories of money, is that barter is SO inefficient that it essentially never actually existed as a system, only in very explicit occasions and between different communities or groups who encountered each other for a very specific time, and even then the barter was often limited to the most clearly salable goods of each group like weapons, furs, etc.

The earliest records of exchange and “money” was actually just tallies of debts among people in the same community.