Oceanyka lived through two periods dominated by hunter-gatherer subsistence: first with Homo Erectus, progenitor of the Xenohuman 🖖 races that mysteriously disappeared, and then with Homo Sapiens, the modern Aboriginals. Around 8,000 BCE, a discovery was made that would forever change Oceanyka: agriculture. This heralded the Neolithic Age, whose primitive economy was based around flint toolmaking, barter, animal husbandry and simple agriculture.
Around 2,400 BCE, early human technologies such as copperworking, calendars, the wheel, writing, etc. were discovered in rapid succession as urbanisation emerged, and with it, a complex intercontinental economy, connecting the entirety of Oceanyka in a web of trade routes. Then, near 1,200 BCE, Bronze was discovered. This period's economy had the following characteristics:
- Coexistence and trade between nomadic groups and agricultural societies. The former (which inhabited regions closer to or within the Outback) produced a surplus of milk, meat, bone, leather and wool, which were traded with the latter (inhabiting the Murray-Darling Basin) for grain and metal tools. This system was further enriched by the Dow, who inhabited a large portion of the Great Dividing Range, thus becoming the premier miners and metalworkers of ancient Oceanyka.
- Long and complex trade routes, as no city-state was particularly capable of producing everything which they needed. The raw materials required to produce Bronze were a particularly important source of continental trade, as this alloy's constituent metals, Copper and Tin, rarely appear together. As cities grew, new social classes emerged: the burghers and the nobles, whose demand for luxury goods and high culture allowed many specialised industries to arise throughout Oceanyka, such as those of jewellery, exotic game, painting, theatre and spices, many of which had to be imported from far-flung places, as far as the Nusantara.
- The construction of large public works using surplus labour; canals, ditches, dams, buildings, temples and most importantly roads were built throughout Oceanyka to help manage its growing city-states and ease public administration. Amongst these The Imperial Cenotaph, The World's End Beacon and The Obelisk stand out as the greatest and most architecturally complex public works in the Oceanykan continent.
By the time of Jesus of Nazareth, Oceanyka possessed a large, complex, late-bronze-age economy comparable to that of the ancient Mediterranean. However, it is precisely its size and complexity that made the Ferozen Invasion of 35 CE so ruinous. The partial destruction of Oceanyka's commercial networks and centres of production during this event was one of the determinants of the Economy of Dark Age Oceanyka.