Scientific American January 2023###Every now and then, I’ll stumble upon a new list of [hu]mankind’s greatest inventions. I’ve long held that our greatest invention, one that necessarily had to precede all these and made them all possible, was something I think all those list-makers overlooked:Baskets. Unlike human children, young chimps, gorillas, orangutans and other primates are independent by the time they’re three or four years old. So what made the switch possible, from solitary eating right where the food was, to communal noshing back at camp? According to Herman Pontzer (quoted above), the cooperative approach to food-gathering “placed a premium on intelligence, and over millennia brain size began to increase.” So the invention of the basket led to big brains which led to everything else that big brains figured out.

Source: The Guardian May 28, 2023 20:00 UTC