Page 17 - MRPC Souvenir Bodhon 2018

The invention which brought

the world together - Money!!

(inspired by the book 'Sapiens….' Authored by Y.N.Harari)
Bappaditya Saha (Flat no. : 8/4A)

Our forefathers discovered fire 8 lakh years ago. By about 3 lakh years ago, they
were using fire on a daily basis. The best thing fire did was cook. Foods that
humans cannot digest in their natural forms such as wheat, rice and potatoes
became staples of our diet thanks to cooking. The advent of cooking enabled
humans to eat more kinds of food, to devote less time to eating, and make do with
smaller teeth and shorter intestines. Some scholars believe there is a direct link
between the advent of cooking, the shortening of the human intestinal track, and
the growth of the human brain. Since long intestines and large brains are both
massive energy consumers, It's hard to have both. By shortening the intestines
and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way to
the jumbo brains of humans.

The discovery of fire may have been by chance but it slowly graduated to be one
of the most important necessity in human life. But the invention of money was not
by chance. It evolved through the socio-economic interactions among humans
through centuries. Our forefathers lived in bands. Each band consisted of a few
dozen members. Each band hunted, gathered and manufactured almost everything
it required, from meat to medicine, from sandals to sorcery. Different band
members may have specialised in different tasks, but they shared their goods and
services through an economy of favours and obligations. A piece of meat given for
free would carry with it the assumption of reciprocity say, free medical assistance.
The band was economically independent; only a few rare items that could not be
found locally, had to be obtained from strangers through simple barter. Little of
this changed with the onset of the Agricultural Revolution, 12,000 years ago. Most
people continued to live in small, intimate communities. Each village was a
self-sufficient economic unit, maintained by mutual favours and obligations plus a
little barter with outsiders.
However with the growth and proliferation of humans and cities and the
improvement of transportation, opportunities came in for specialisation. Populated
cities provided full-time employment for professional shoemakers, doctors,
carpenters, priests, soldiers and lawyers. But specialisation created a problem how
do you manage the exchange of goods between the specialists? An economy of
favours and obligations doesn't work when large numbers of strangers try to
cooperate. Barter is effective only when exchanging a limited range of products.
It cannot form the basis for a complex economy. After all, a trade requires that
each side want what the other has to offer. What happens if the shoemaker
doesn't like apples and, if at the moment in question, what he really wants is a
doctor? Our forefathers started thinking…. what if people are willing to use
something in order to represent systematically the value of other things for the
purpose of exchanging goods and services? …. And eventually they developed
Money. History's first known money Sumerian barley money. It appeared in Sumer
Contd..