I might be biased because I recently learned about the "paying with sound of money" story (If you read french you can read about it in one of my blog) Its roots are unsure, but around the XVI century we had the same story in Arab, in German and in French: The hero (Nassreddine in Arabs, Till Eulespiegel in German, Joan in French) is hungry. On the market he sit next to someone selling pie (or chicken) and spend the day enjoying the smell. The Merchant ask to be paid, and the hero pay him by making noise with money in his purse. It make more sense to assume the story traveled for one to the other place than to guess it was already known when German/french/Arab was one tongue. My bias is that story travel fast when they are good. My Occam Lightsaber guess a story would have been written by someone, somewhere, before the Grimm Brothers in the XVe, if it was out for 4000 years. But may be the science in the common ancestry theory is sound. I dunno, Linguistic is far out of my reach.