I went to a talk at the British Museum where they described the first known financial transactions as being exchanges of debt - promissary notes to exhange a set amount of goods or services for whatever goods & services someone else had to offer in exchange.
It was after that that coinage came into use, including in China, but the lecturer said debt came first, well ahead of the idea of a gold coin or some form of currency with innate value, which is what we often think of as the origins of money.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.