That book is on my list to read.
One of the most interesting things I've heard about money is what Giordano Bruno (1548 – 1600) supposedly said: "Whatever has the greatest value and the least cost of storage becomes money."
it's a good book, but the earlier chapters regarding tribal economics and the valued currency being tribal women themselves is questionable from a truth standpoint.
Tribes traded people for goods and services, sometimes temporarily. It was mostly a sex and politics thing, but the book views it as a form of currency bartering and trade; I think there is more nuance there.
If you look at a pidgin English dialect like Nigerian pidgin, and compare it to British English or for that matter Nigerian non-pidgin English, you might assume that pidgin English was the original form, since it's simpler, and that British English evolved from it. But in fact the truth is the opposite: pidgin English is a simplified version of English developed as a lingua franca for international communication.
The same seems to be true of hard currency and especially barter. Hard currency is pidgin banking; barter is pidgin hard currency. Rai stones show us the complexity of social arrangements surrounding money that in a homogeneous culture within a generation or two, but which are only legible to someone who grew up in the culture to which that money belongs. In Yap this heritage has been preserved, although diminished in importance; elsewhere it has been mostly lost.
Hard currency is sufficiently simple to bridge cultural gaps and even gaps between ages, like pidgin English or Glosa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years