There's no evidence that people used barter as we imagine they did. David Graeber goes into it in his book debt, or there's a shorter discussion here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-society-myth/471051/
"No academics I talked to were aware of any evidence that barter was actually the precursor to money, despite the story’s prevalence in economics textbooks and the public’s consciousness. Some argue that no one ever believed barter was real to begin with—the idea was a crude model used to simplify the context of modern economic systems, not a real theory about past ones."
