New Evidence Suggests That Basket Making May Have Begun 2 Million Years Ago

Recent excavations at the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, Africa have revealed new information about some of the earliest hominins, probably Homo habilis, from 2 million years ago. For the purposes of this article, the main point is that these early humans walked 12 km or 7.5 miles to gather specific stones that they used for making Oldowan stone tools and for putting together a toolkit. And these specific stones made up the majority of stones found. They did this for several hundred thousand years. I argue that to do this, they probably had containers or early baskets to help them carry a large collection of stones back to their settlements, since walking that far would have been counterproductive if they only gathered a few stones. Next in this article, I show how very simple carriers could have been from natural plant materials, carriers that might have been like some of the earliest baskets.