The origins and development of mobile containers: Biocultural perspectives on Pleistocene containment

• The first comprehensive assessment of the evidence for Pleistocene mobile containers. • Presents a new database of Pleistocene containment technology. • Identifies a ‘container transition’ in human evolution from a primate-to-hominin engagement with containment technology. • Proposes a biocultural perspective viewing container use and manufacture as a process of niche construction. Containers are ubiquitous and universal across all present-day societies. The substantial increase in the quantity and diversity of containers in the archaeological record following the establishment of sedentary farming communities in the Neolithic means that the broader evolutionary implications of the development of containers are often overlooked, despite their origins extending back to the Pleistocene. This paper advocates for the importance of specifically mobile (portable) containers for Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, presenting the first comprehensive assessment of the evidence for Pleistocene mobile containers in a new dataset that documents more than 700 examples of Pleistocene containers. We use this dataset to; 1) characterise Pleistocene container use and 2) examine the timing and underlying causes of a Pleistocene ‘container transition’ from a primate- to human (hominin)-type of engagement with containment technology. Focusing primarily on containers as a technology of transportation, and highlighting the strong selective pressures across the hominin lineage for technological solutions to the challenges of moving food, water, raw materials, and infants across the landscape, we draw attention to the evolutionary implications and significance of containers; a significance rooted in their transportation affordances and the resultant opportunities that containers offered for hominin niche construction and the biocultural adaptations of Palaeolithic foragers.