The earliest and most essential human technology was not the weapon but the carrier: a bag, net, gourd, sling, or basket used to gather and hold more than one hand could carry. This recasts the foundational act of culture as collection and containment rather than striking or killing.
A narrative built around the weapon demands conflict, a hero, a climax, and a linear thrust toward victory or death. A narrative built around the carrier bag can instead hold many things loosely together, relating objects and people without needing a single conquering protagonist, so the chosen central object dictates the available shape of the story.
Treat a novel as a container: a bundle holding people, things, and their relations in a particular shape, rather than as an arrow aimed at a target. Seen this way, the significance of a story lies in what and how it gathers and relates, not in how it drives conflict to resolution.
Le Guin cites the anthropological point that early humans got most of their calories from gathered plants and seeds, not from the dramatic big-game hunt. The mammoth killing made the memorable story even though the quiet, repeated act of putting oats in a container actually sustained the group, showing how the exciting event crowds out the real sustaining activity in what gets told.
The Hero figure, organized around killing and conquest, tends to dominate and distort any story he enters, making it his alone and recasting everything else as mere setting for his triumph. Le Guin positions this not as the natural form of story but as one culturally privileged shape that can be set aside in favor of less conquest-driven narratives.