It's quite likely that non-perishable food like tallow and honey were the earliest forms of naturally emerging commodity money.
These goods are readily available, can last for decades before rotting, are easily divisible, verifiable and fungible.
As with any money, it's likely that humans tried their best to inflate the supply. In the case of tallow, this might have lead to mass extinction of some large mammels.
Thus the discovery of metallic money might have saved uncountable animal lives.
Pelts too. Same longevity benefits of tallow and could have faced supply inflation that threatened the megafauna.
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I dunno, you need rather large amounts of them to significantly prolong life during famine, about 0.5 kg/day/person, and you need to protect them from spoilage and insect/animal predation. That only sounds plausible for a static society, but before domestication, only nomadic societies were likely to obtain regular access to honey and non-fish meat.
No doubt this would be a primitive form of money and society, but I would guess that humans figured out how to store especially honey and tallow for a prolonged time, much sooner than we figured out the nuances of metallurgy
I'm unaware of any evidence of long term storage in any prehistoric society of large amounts of honey or fat. The quantities needed to significantly extend human life during famine are huge and preservation using prehistoric methods was difficult and unreliable. It's much easier to keep animals alive than to store their fat. It's much easier to have bees guard their own honey against predation than to have humans guard it.
Where did you get that number? Most people eating carnivore today need around 1kg of food per day. That's 250-440g of fat.
Yeah, 1 kg/day in modern times to maintain weight and full fitness sounds right to me. In prehistoric times, the average human was significantly shorter (so lower BMI) and the body will down regulate calorie burn as it enters starvation, so I guessed the minimum requirement during a prehistoric famine was about half, i e. 0.5 kg.
IIRC humans weren't really much shorter before they started eating grains. Even with down regulation, I doubt they could go under 0.7.
Anyway, that supports your point - it's probably higher.
