PostiveNoise
I'd give a separate extra upvote for the cat participating, if I could!
In the mid 70s Eric Idle (from Monty Python) had a Beatles parody band called The Rutles, and created a television mockumentary in 1978 called 'All You Need is Cash', and this was probably a pretty big influence on Spinal Tap in the early 80s.
ok. I too am now imagining dinosaur hookers, and it's not even the weekend yet. RARHH!
There were probably professions that long predate history, and any of those are a bit hard to prove. There were 'shaman' in pre-history, and good shaman were quite possibly supported by their communities. There may also have been things like dedicated cooks. Trading sex for food however, is clearly hundreds of thousands if not millions of years old, so it's hard to argue that other professions came before it.
This article has some elements of truth, but skips over some important stuff. In particular, the odds of making a living writing books when on salary, writing the books for a big company or celebrities etc, are vastly higher than just writing your own books. You don't have to beat insane odds if someone hires you for 70k/year to write books...you simply make that 70k/year. It's the same as e.g. people working in the video game industry. The odds of earning a middle class income as an Indie Game developer are super bad, but there are many thousands of people working salaried jobs in the mainstream AAA game industry who are definitely 'making a living'.
Also, this is nothing new. There is a reason 'starving artist' is a common term. For centuries, a lot of the most well known people in all creative fields were people who already had money when they started e.g. nobility, and some of those people were able to become famous, largely because they didn't have financial pressures that the vast majority of people had.
Often the form factor is like a tiny pickup truck, so they are very versatile in terms of hauling stuff. The small size makes them very easy to park and maneuver through dense chaotic traffic. So from cost to functionality, they are in a pretty sweet spot. They aren't super safe in high speed traffic accidents, but in crowded cities, vehicles are not going super fast anyway, so the drawbacks are less important than their positive attributes.