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gold, jewels, cowrie shells, or Yap stone Rai.

None of these are fiat money. They are all examples of money that people accepted voluntarily. Fiat money is that which government compels us to accept in lieu of things that we value.

A difference without a distinction. It's almost like you are saying that Native Americans or the Yap Islanders had no government. Economists are also very interested in the Rai system, given it's similarity to modern money. http://www.ancient-origins.net...

People accept it as money, their government accepts it as money, so it is money.

Gold has many properties that make it an excellent money commodity. Go and look up what they are before you embarrass yourself further.

-jcr

Um, exactly when did this become a commodity discussion instead of a currency discussion? Of course Gold is a commodity, it has many uses in electronics and lasers and telescopy and biology. Handy stuff to have around the house. So do a lot of other metals.Gold was a basis for currency long before many of these known uses.

Now if you wish, we can go back to using gold as a basis for currency.

The gold standard of economic systems demands that outside of actually handing over a specific amount of gold for a purchase, you have paper or coin that can be exchanged for an equivalent value of gold upon demand. Coupled with bimetallism which includes two metals as a standard, with fixed values of each - Originally 15:1 - it gets pretty messy when market pressures change one in relation to the other. This indeed happened with the silver certificates that came about after the US dumped bimetallism. Messy indeed, even if it gave the US some pretty cool looking bills.

The problem with using say Gold as the basis of a monetary system is that we only have so much of it. The old school set value of 35 dollars an ounce was a bit of a joke, as under a gold standard, what do you think would happen if everyone demanded their dollars worth of gold? If a standard adheres rigidly to currency = amount of the standard, nothing happens, unless more is mined.

The silliness reached a peak when we entered the age of a non-convertable gold standard, then a convertible only by banks but not citizens after World War 2.

What is amazing is that some folks would like to return to the old boom and bust cycle that the old gold and bimetallic standards in their various forms were a part of - read the history of this.

Which returns me to my original point, that all money standards are fiat, or if that word causes you great umbrage - exchange it with "made up". Gold or Calcite, its all made up.

Legend vs Myth vs History. However, remember that the OT was basically written, or rewritten, after the Babylonian captivity, and that (being a living document) it was rewritten every single time it was copied in manuscript. It is chock full of anachronisms, and actually, a lot of its "history" does NOT line up with archeology. There is considerable doubt that Moses was a real person, for example, and if he was, there is no record of him on the Egyptian side (where they kept good records). Here is one account that points to the utter lack of historical evidence for ANY "Exodus", and establishes the made-up conclusion that Moses was a conflation of two different people with completely different stories (made up because there isn't any real evidence outside of the contradictions of the Biblical accounts for either one). http://www.ancient-origins.net...

A better summary is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (see "historicity"). Moses was basically unmentioned until after the exile, and at that point appears to be a rewrite of an ancient Sumerian mythic figure, like (for that matter) the flood. But then, the Canaanites were basically Sumerians.

This is incredibly confused. 103 was the *maximum recorded lifespan.* What matters is the *average lifespan.* It is true that if one takes into account improvements in infant mortality the jump in life expectancy hasn't been as large http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins/life-expectancy-myth-and-why-many-ancient-humans-lived-long-077889. But even given that, life expectancy on average has gone up by about a decade in the US in the last 200 years even if one only works at people surviving past infancy.

I do believe it is as simple, and obvious, as that, caps or not ,chimpanzees, aren't persons. I abide Merriam Webster's definition of person. Chimpanzees, may be self aware and possess a modicum of language yet this does not make them persons.

While, I would assert, that all persons are humans, I would not assert that all persons are strictly Homo sapiens but in fact contain a fair bit of Homo neanderthalensis.

One day may come and one day we may be visited by extraterrestrials and knowing humans, it may well be a mortal insult to call them persons. On That Day(tm) the question can be revisited and some will choose to expand the definition of person, others will want to refer to them as what they are, or create and define a new noun.

If we look again at the estimated maximum life expectancy for prehistoric humans, which is 35 years, we can see that this does not mean that the average person living at this time died at the age of 35. Rather, it means that for every child that died in infancy, another person might have lived to be 70. The life expectancy statistic is, therefore, a deeply flawed way to think about the quality of life of our ancient ancestors.

source: http://www.ancient-origins.net...

Here is a better article with actual pictures