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.