This is my theory on how the idea of money came to be.

Waaaaay way back a long time ago, if a caveman needed something, he got it the only way he knew how. He found a bison leg and pasted another caveman over the head and took his stuff. This worked well for a while until some of the weaker cavemen got tired of getting their asses kicked in. They decided that a system of barter was a better idea wherein they would trade something for something they wanted.
The first problem was to figure out what to use for trade, not everyone always had something that the other guy wanted in return and often one guy would still get the shit kicked out of him. Someone made the suggestion that maybe they could use something that they could all acquire easily ....like rocks or rawks as they spelled it back then. This worked ok for a while until they realized that the planet was lousy with rawks. This meant that every caveman was literally a bajillionaire. Also when the guy traded his stuff away for rawks he ended up with an assload of rawks that he couldnt get rid of. It appeared that this wasn't such a good idea after all, so they chucked the guy who came up with that idea into a tar pit ...... which was the national past time for cavemen.

Back to the drawing rawk.

Then a guy named rawkafella, unaware of the irony of his name...... or the word irony, made the suggestion of trading something folks both valued and needed but was hard to come by, like a favorite food. He thought brontasaurus burgers should be traded with and they all said "yea, that a good idea" until a caveman named thok said that brontasaurus burgers had been extinct for the last 10 million years.
Someone else thought maybe BIGGER rawks would be a better idea because they would be harder to acquire, but that proved worthless because they wouldnt fit into the billfolds that farg had just invented and patented yesterday. They couldnt seem to get away from the original rawk idea. They just knew that there was something to the rawks but they couldnt get past the fact that they were dumber than a whole sack of them.

One day while the cavemen were having a tailgate party at the 479th game of the world cup throwing a guy into the tar pit playoffs, a cavemen named Tim had a brainstorm. " Why we dont invent checkbooks"
"Brilliant! What hell is checkbook?"
Tim explained that they could write out a cheque as a sort of promise, in exchange for actually paying right then. They could leave their BIG rawks at home and promise to pay later when they had time to haul them to the other person. This worked for a week until people started lying about having any rawks at all. Soon people were floating hot checks all over the place.
A mob got together and pounded Tim senseless with his 17 foot granite checkbook and took all his stuff.
No one wanted to come up with any more ideas after that because when someone had one they ended up eating tar or fed to a saber toothed fruitbat. They all agreed that if they ever saw another person wanting to trade something it would be 30 billion years too soon as far as they were concerned.

30 billion years later, little shiney yellow rawks were discovered and the gold standard was invented.

I'm listening to an old CD of Deep Ellum musicians in the same era of Edie Brickell and Tripping Daisy. Man it's strange to relive those days in my head.