I dont think you appreciate how hard it was to accomplish even pottery, from start to finish in what was a hunter gatherer society for most of that time. Sometime in that million years language itself was developing, and whatever cool shit you learned to do in your spare time, you could only tell someone about it, and not that precisely. Evolution itself was at work on the brain in that timefrime, as glacial as its pace is. Social units were small, you were probably the only one interested in dumb shit like shiny rocks or weird earth that gets hard in a fire and it probably took a long ass time before they even got to the point when it actually became useful like for carrying water, because even that would have been a lot of effort.
The technological process for these was probably started, abandoned, picked up again hundreds of times before someone first started obtaining results that were clearly beneficial, and once that happened it gave a group enough of an advantage to start reliably passing knowledge down the generations.
Check out bbc's A world in a 100 objects they talked about this stuff
