Historical precedent for moneyless or tradeless communities is sparse in terms of evidence, but there is ample reason to believe that primitive human societies were cooperative by default and operated an implicit trade system.

In his influential book, Debt: The First 5000 Years, David Graebar writes:

“The refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found throughout the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations..”