THE ORIGINS OF MONEY

Standardised Bronze Age objects may have acted as ancient currency. In a paper published in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers from Leiden University in the Netherlands are adding an Early Bronze Age piece to the currency puzzle. They’re proposing that Bronze Age people may have used rings and axe blades as an early form of standardised currency.

The authors studied just over 5,000 objects made of bronze in rings, ribs and axe blades from more than 100 ancient hoards.

Based on the similarity in weight and shape of the bronze objects, they suggest the objects were standardised as currency.

“Found in bulk, sometimes in hoards containing multiple hundreds, many of the rings, ribs and axe blades are considered to have no other practical function besides their tentative use as ingots, or rough-outs for further production,” the authors write.

The objects’ weights were compared using a psychology principle known as the Weber fraction, which suggests if objects are similar in mass, a human being weighing them by hand can’t tell the difference.