Container Database Pushes Origins Back 500,000 Years
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- Marc Kissel and colleagues at Appalachian State University compiled a database of 739 prehistoric mobile containers, published April 8 in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, with every example falling within the last 500,000 years of the 2.58-million-year Pleistocene epoch.
- The database's oldest entry is a bark tray or dish from Kalambo Falls, Zambia, dated 400,000–500,000 years old and originally excavated in the 1950s by archaeologist John Desmond Clark.
- 87.8% of containers in the database were found in Europe, but Kissel attributes this to the concentration of archaeological work on the continent rather than any European origin for containers — the oldest specimen is from Africa.
- The team used a deliberately broad definition that captures items beyond pots and baskets, including spoons, carved-stone lamps (such as the red sandstone lamp from Lascaux Cave, France), hollow swan wing-bone tubes for carrying needles, and ostrich eggs used to carry water across Africa.
- Kissel argues baby slings may have been among the earliest containers, emerging when hominins became bipedal and lost body hair, meaning Lucy the Australopithecus afarensis was likely carried in a sling 3.4 million years ago.
- The reframing builds on feminist scholarship from the 1970s — Nancy Tanner and Adrienne Zihlman argued in 1976 that baskets were among humanity's first tools, and Elizabeth Fisher made the same case in her 1979 book Woman's Creation, ideas Kissel says were long dismissed before the evidence caught up.
Why it matters: This pushes the documented origin of containers back roughly fifty-fold — from the Neolithic pottery revolution (~10,000 years ago) to at least 500,000 years ago — and Kissel argues even that is likely a floor, since preservation bias hides older examples. If baby slings are correct, the foundational narrative of human tool use shifts from clubs and blades to carrying devices, a reframing originating with feminist anthropologists in the 1970s whose ideas were dismissed for decades before a dedicated dataset validated them.
