Our European ancestors already had one primitive form of money 3,500 years ago, and used it to buy and sell how we do today: this is the revolutionary conclusion to which a study published on Nature Human Behaviour which has distorted what we believed true to date – that The economy of the Bronze Age was based on the barter. “We tend to romanticize European prehistory, as if it were a fantasy kingdom,” he comments to Newscientist Nicola Ialongo, one of the authors. “It was instead a place where people had a family, friends, a job, and they had to be able to get to the end of the month.”
Protomonon? The study analyzed beyond 20,000 metal objects accumulated in treasures of theBronze Age Found in Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia and Germany. Around the 1,500 BC These pieces of metal have started to have a standard weight (10 grams and multiples): according to experts, this change would indicate the transition to a form of coins ante litteram.
In the samples analyzed, the coins are distributed as in modern European families: The lightest metals – like our coins from one or two euros, of little value and used for daily expenses – are those more widespreadwhile the heavier ones – of greater value, like a 100 or 200 euro banknote – are rather rare.
New theories. Experts They therefore argue that the Economic System of the Bronze Age was regulated by the supply and demand market forcesand that everyone would participate in proportion to their earnings. This hypothesis is clearly contrasting with the prevalent vision of the anthropologist of the 1940s Karl Polanyi, according to which the economies of the time would have been founded on barter.
Skeptiscism. If it is true that many experts not involved in the research have defined the hypothesis of the new credible study, there are also those who have proven more skeptical: this is the case of Erica Schoenberger of the John Hopkins University, who called “risky” to suppose that ordinary people used money at the time as us today, stating that Not even in the Middle Ages they had such modern habits. “The English farmers – he explains – began to sell their products in exchange for money only when the landowners began to request it in place of rents in nature and taxes, but they did not keep it for themselves”. They sold So to get money, But their behavior was far from being comparable to that of the modern economy.
“Technically we have not shown that that of the Bronze Age was a market economybut we have not even found evidence that it was not “, Ialongo points out, who wonders:« Because they are all convinced that the market economy did not exist, if everything we see can be explained in a simple way with an economy model market? “
