you're viewing it through a modern (and historically wrong) perspective. I would say our ancestors were incredibly SMART. Imagine yourself in the 15th century

you're viewing it through a modern (and historically wrong) perspective. I would say our ancestors were incredibly SMART. Imagine yourself in the 15th century. Sorry. 15th century, BC. You want to transact with someone else, but you don't know whether or not to trust them. You need some sort of THING that you can minimally destructively validate is what it is to establish trust in an intersubjective fashion. Well, hey, there is this material that is soft (so you can nondestructively rub off a bit of it) that has a unique color (due to some wierd relativistic quantum mechanics), so that you can have a series of standards that you can test against to evaluate the purity of the material and verify how much of it you have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchstone_(assaying_tool) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchstone_(assaying_tool) you can verify the quality of the THING, you don't need a mass spectrometer, you don't need analytical chemistry, you don't need a blockchain or GPU computations. And that's why gold was smart.