"How else do you explain the persistence of markets/capitalism as the dominant (not exclusive) economic form for most societies for the last 5 millennia?" Err, millennia? Not that long in Europe (few century ago in fact) market was not the benchmarking, but honour.
At your death bed, you had to give your fortune, your earthly possessions as you had to prepare to face God as you came, naked...
During millennia in fact, civilisations bloomed without the market economy. I explained it on the line market economy is a political construction, where the ones who possess protected their property/powers (through laws, force and propaganda) against the ones who have none.
I seem to recall something about a primitive form of stock market and banking developing in ancient Mesopotamia on the basis of futures and derivatives, until a particular monarch realized he could simply appropriate the wealth of the entire enterprise and it was no longer. So you're both right - the form is not persistent, but the impulse is.