Yes, I think so. Above the Dunbar number. As neighbouring tribes interbreed they carry cultural references and converge on the same monetary medium. I'm not sure that this started as trade though, it's more likely an extension of the internal patronage system employed to settle conflicts. If one tribe continuously defeats neighbouring tribes there comes a time when taking territory isn't practical, because the victor cannot defend it or harvest it's resources. It's better to take a commodity that can be stored, like cows or salt or gold.

Tribes that are subject to the violence of some local thug, who keeps taking our their fighting males, end up giving a ransom. This ransom needs to be something that doesn't degrade before it can be used, and it also has to be portable. At a certain point it's recognised by the thug that the ransom need not be used at all, it's better to keep it as a social signal to other tribes ("I'm the daddy in this region, don't fuck with me").

That's the point where the utility value competes with the monetary value, and there is always a reason to accumulate this commodity because:

• it's evidence of excess wealth or power
• it can be given up as a sacrifice to preserve fighting strength or crops or something you need short term to survive.

Because it's always worth accumulating it solves the coincidence of wants, and that's the point you get trade and can really scale up cooperation.

To be clear, I'm not arguing for MMT. The local thug may choose between a subset of local commodities. Maybe it's boggy in their region and storage capabilities are different. Or maybe it's some legacy from before a migration that determines which commodity is preferable, or the preference of the thug he just defeated. But the monetary medium is always ultimately subject to physics. Is it hard to get, easy to verify, universal, and sovereign (SoV). And is it portable, divisible, fungible, durable (MoE).

This is probably why our species scaled up and defeated the Neanderthals. By orienting a much larger group of people towards the accumulation of the same subset of durable commodities we could efficiently avoid violence on first contact. It was not worth fighting until a group knows what they are going to gain in wealth, so I one tribe knows what the other has it's important to show up with some desirable good of their own to entice them into combat. Eventually the violence becomes ceremonial, what we know as sport, and the goods are traded directly.

Then the tribes agree on specific dates to settle disputes and disagreements, and they invent giant clocks, sundials, at the top of hills in the boundary points between tribes. These become henges, ceremonial burial mounds, temples, and eventually cathedrals, all oriented towards the sun to mark a specific gathering day when multi-polar inter-tribal competition and trade takes place.

Repeat interactions increases trust and you get a ratcheting effect towards peaceful cooperation. But if a bigger society comes in a destroys your temple, as the Romans did to the Jewish tribes, you lose your centre of gravity and consensus breaks down, and that's the point at which societies became oriented around books instead of temples.