A lot of folks think advanced societies are impossible without some form of money or credit system, as a store of wealth and medium of exchange. Is this true?

This is not true. Money has a purpose in societies with a certain technical sophistication and in a physical setting where an object of some kind can be used as a representative of value. The problems come in when the representative of value, although a physical object of some kind, has no inherent value of its own but is only serving as a token. This is true of currencies and in today’s world, most coins, they are not made of precious metal, they are made of base metal that serves to have something one can hold but have very little intrinsic value compared to their stated and accepted value based on trust. Advanced civilizations use a kind of barter system that is based on tangible assets and that is something mutually agreed upon and serves in the same way as currencies but is stable, avoids the problems of counterfeiting, and the problems of manipulation of value that can be done with printed currency, for example. Without absolute control over the production of the currency, it is too subject to government manipulation through money printing, in particular, and this is the downfall of all such schemes. No currency remains stable—none have stood the test of time in fact. This is no accident because it speaks to the universal need for something widely recognized that has a set of attributes to be a stable and real value that cannot be counterfeited or manipulated in some way to defraud.