There was more to the old man’s comment than pure whimsy. For when viewed through the prism of a hunter-gatherer’s perspective, the world of money and finance truly does lend itself to the kind of trickery and sleight of hand associated with magicians and tricksters; more than most residents of developed countries would likely admit, the economic contrivances that course through daily life are abstract, sometimes arbitrary, almost supernaturally inexplicable, and yet, despite all that, agreed upon as necessary and normal. The story of how paper money made its way to into Ju/’hoansi society—and then quickly retreated from it—reveals how the basic features of an economy are so often taken for granted by people more accustomed to assigning monetary value to objects and time.

Fifty years ago, Ju/’hoansi in Nyae Nyae still hunted and gathered for a living, just as their ancestors had done since the first expansion of modern Homo sapiens across southern Africa around 200,000 years ago. Their isolated community came to global attention in 1966 when a young Canadian anthropologist, Richard Lee, conducted a series of simple economic input-output analyses to get a better idea of how hard hunter-gatherers like Ju/’hoansi had to work to get by. Up until then, anthropologists, historians, and economists assumed that hunter-gatherers endured lives of unremitting hardship, and that it was only with the advent of agriculture that humanity began to gradually liberate itself from the tyranny of nature. The Ju/’hoansi were considered to be a particularly good example of how humans’ long-suffering ancestors lived. Not only were they isolated from modernity, but they also lived in as hostile an environment as it is possible to find.

To his surprise, Lee established that the Ju/’hoansi not only managed to feed themselves better than many in the industrialized world, but that they did so on the basis of only around two hours foraging a day, and cheerfully spent the rest of their time on more leisurely pursuits such as napping, playing games, and making art. On the strength of Lee’s findings and the growing weight of evidence from similar societies elsewhere, anthropologists started calling hunter-gatherers “the original affluent society” and turned the established narrative of social evolution on its head.

Over time, a more sophisticated picture of the Ju/’hoansi’s affluence emerged—one I saw firsthand living in southern Africa for 25 years and one I describe in my recent book, Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen. The Ju/’hoansi had an unyielding confidence in the providence of their environment and in their knowledge of how to exploit it. This meant that the Ju/’hoansi, like other hunter-gatherers, focused almost myopically on the short term—if the environment always supplied food and materials and the seasons were broadly predictable, what point was there in worrying about the future? This confidence also meant that the Ju/’hoansi did not store food for more than a few days and only expended energy on securing just enough to meet their immediate needs—in much the same way that many harried city dwellers live hand to mouth on convenience foods.