One important myth to be cracked was that males were always the main inventors and tool users in our past. Zihlman is convinced this is wrong. While chimpanzees tend to pick and eat their food alone and on the spot, at some point in history humans began to gather and bring it back home to share. They would have needed containers to hold all this food, as well as slings to carry their babies while they gathered—and both probably before anyone created stone hunting tools. These are likely to have been the earliest human inventions, she says, and they would have been used by women. One of the
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