1. Money has been a part of human history for almost 3,000 years. 

2. What is money?  It is really just something of value. At the dawn of humanity, exchanging stuff one person had in exchange for stuff another person had  was used as a form of money to get goods you did not have.  For example, if one person raised chickens but needed some wheat,  he or she would swap  a chicken for some wheat.  This is called bartering. As early human beings began to farm with cows and sheep,  animals became one of the earliest forms of money  and later vegetables and grain, such as wheat.

3. The first use of cowrie shells, the shell of a type of shellfish  that was  available in the shallow waters of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, was used in China. Historically, many societies have used cowries as money,  even as recently as the middle of this century in places such as Africa.

4. The cowrie is the most widely and longest used currency in history.

5. The first known actual money was created by King Alyattes in Lydia which is now part of Turkey, in the year 600 BC, about 2,618 years ago. This first coin ever used had a roaring lion on it's face.

6. The largest object used for money was huge wheel made of rock from the island of Palau. They  were transported to the island of Yap by canoe to be used as currency. The most valuable pieces were the ones that caused the most deaths during transport.

7. In Roman times, salt was used as money because it was  a very scarce. Our word “salary” is derived from the Latin word for salt, “salarium”.

8. For similar reasons to the Romans tradeing salt, other regions traded pepper.  When Attila the Hun attacked Rome, he demanded a ransom of pepper.

9. Bronze and Copper cowrie copies were manufactured by China at the end of the Stone Age and are the earliest forms of metal coins.

10. Metal tool money, such as knife and spade monies, was also first used in China. These early metal monies were early versions of round coins.

11. Chinese coins were made out of  soft metal, often with holes so they could be put together in a chain.

12. ​Outside of China, the first coins were developed out of lumps of silver. They soon took the familiar round form of today, and were stamped with various gods and emperors to mark them as offical. These early coins first appeared in  Turkey, but the techniques were quickly copied  by the Greek, Persian, Macedonian and later the Roman empires.

13. What was possibly the start of paper money, traders in China used  paper receipts for trading copper instead of actual copper. Bank notes began being used around 1661 AD. 

14. Leather money was used in China in the form of one-foot-square pieces of deerskin with colorful borders. This was the first documented type of banknote.

15. The earliest known use of  strings of beads made from clam shells, was used  by North American Indians in 1535.  The Indian word "wampum" for this money means white, which was the color of many of the beads.

16. Gold was officially made the standard of value for money in England in 1816. Standard banknotes  were  used for a certain amount of gold. Banknotes had been used in England and Europe for several hundred years before this time, but their worth had never been tied directly to gold.

17. In the United States, the Gold Standard Act was official enacted in 1900, which helped lead to the start of a central banking system.

18. When Argentina ran out of coins in 2008 people used tootsie rolls or other small candies instead.

19. Some places in Africa use beer bottle caps as currency, especially since the breweries started printing bonus prizes under the caps in an attempt to copy Coca Cola.

20.  The first credit card was introduced in 1946.

21. Wearable technology today is set to disrupt the world of money once more, as some banks are trying a contact-less payments wristband.

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