Trade is 10 times as old as farming.

Ridley’s claim is a provocative way of emphasizing that exchange and specialization likely predate agriculture by a wide margin. The point is not that prehistoric people ran “markets” in the modern sense, but that humans (and perhaps earlier hominins) benefited from swapping goods, skills, or access—creating mutual gains and encouraging division of labor—long before settled farming societies emerged. By framing trade as far older than farming, Ridley challenges the common story that agriculture created surplus and only then enabled commerce; instead, he suggests that exchange itself may have been a driver of innovation, cooperation, and ultimately the transition to more complex economies.