Oldest anthropological sites in the world appear to have been used for religious ceremony (community building) and trade (economics). The economists aren't terribly off the mark.
This article seems to want to return to a pseudo-Rousseau view of the world where the wilds are religious.
The author seems less concerned with what "happens easily" than with what is taken as a kind of natural law. The dominant ideology of the present (for which he is presenting an intellectual history) supposes that market forces are this natural law. It is this supposition that cannot stand up to long term history. We are better off reading anthropology and sociology when trying to understand the origins of money and exchange than we are economists, who simply invent facile notions of their origins seemingly out of thin air