2.1. The image of man

André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–1986) was professor of prehistory at the Collège de France (1969–1982). “Prehistory” means what comes before history. Life on Earth began almost 4 billion years ago, and the evolutionary lineage that led to man has been separated from other primates for 7 million years: all this without man and before man. Our difficulty in thinking about such a space of time comes from the fact that it overflows our own human time, which has given meaning to what we understand by “origin” or “genealogy”. Thus, we not only make a genealogy from ourselves, but also from our own concepts of “Man” or “human nature”. Against such an approach, Leroi-Gourhan insists on the fact that prehistory confronts us with a very different time, namely a “geological time”. “Geological time” is that which follows the formation of mountains or the formation of species. In this sense, prehistory deals with “what is doubly buried in the earth and in the past” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 10¹). It is necessary to excavate, find, date and interpret, and here the singularity of the researcher is that he is at the same time an archaeologist, ethnologist and paleontologist.

Paleontology is the science of fossils. Dealing with the buried – the unknown – it is an empirical science that is not experimental but retrospective (like history). Fossils bear witness to the evolution of living beings and thus to their kinship. The question is not “why is there evolution”, but more empirically “how this evolution took place”. The method is comparative, both to be able to reconstruct the living beings of the past from very meagre fragments and to compare species with each other. These are living beings that no longer exist – a paleontology, not an ontology – and which may have existed under conditions (e.g. climatic) other than those that prevail today. The dinosaur world no longer exists. It disappeared with the disappearance of the dinosaurs. Without this disappearance, the world might well be different and perhaps without the human species. Also Leroi-Gourhan’s work is closer to Cuvier’s – the founder of paleontology – than to Darwin’s work. Cuvier’s comparative method allows us to think of a “structural morphology” of the living world that accentuates a distinction between organs and functions². This distinction later became the master distinction of Leroi-Gourhan.

A past separated from ourselves also gives us an exteriority. In other words, a critical distance from our own conceptions of life and particularly from that species of which we are a part, which the Swedish botanist Linné called “Homo sapiens”. While human paleontology – paleoanthropology – does not exploit this critical distance, it risks being nothing more than a projection of our current conceptions of man. Thus, Le Geste et la parole begins with a critique of the “image of man” that “fossil men” seriously question. It is a question of highlighting the “philosophical situation of fossil man” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 166). It is up to “fossil men” to overturn the dominant image of man. In the first place, this image includes man in relation to a “natural man” from whom he comes or who represents his foundation or nature. The image has two versions – one “cerebralist” and the other “naturalist”. The cerebralist version involves a man who, in coming out of nature, invents himself: “Rousseau, in Discourse on Inequality (1755), gives one of the first drafts of a ‘cerebralist’ theory of human evolution. The natural man endowed with all his present attributes, starting from the initial material zero, gradually invents, by imitating the beasts and by reasoning, all that in the technical and social order leads him to the present world” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 19). In short, there is a human species that comes out of nature where we find the “good savage” or “natural man”. This conception is falsified by the discoveries of human fossils belonging to different human species. Instead of a single human species – our own – we should speak of human species in the plural, some of which can be found on a lineage leading to “Homo sapiens”. Thus, “Homo” as the genus (family) of “Sapiens” takes on a whole new meaning. Instead of looking for a “missing link” that can link us to the apes, human fossils link us to human species that lived from about 3 million years ago; “it will take the ‘Australopithecian revolution’ of the last twenty years to unblock the question of the missing link” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 24). “Human paleontology has only exorcised the ape ancestor in the last few years” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 27).

Who were the Australopithecus – literally “southern apes”? Neither apes nor modern humans, they belonged according to Leroi-Gourhan to the human race (to the “Homo”). Most paleontologists do not agree with this judgment. The dispute concerns the question of criteria. What criterion should define the human race? Leroi-Gourhan was formal in his approach: the criterion is given by the morphology of the body. The Australopithecus had a small brain but it walked upright, and the “standing position” is the definition of our genus. Also, Leroi-Gourhan argued that it was misnamed; “an improper name that goes back to the still recent time when we saw advanced apes. Here they are considered Australanthropes” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 94)³. On the other hand, it must be said that in the perspective of “geological time”, the notion of species can be confusing in the sense that there are only almost imperceptible successions. But the criterion chosen is not arbitrary, and Leroi-Gourhan argued that there is a simple reason that excludes the Australanthrope from humanity: his brain is too small, only a third of ours. “No fossil relatively close to us leaves this feeling of strangeness, almost of embarrassment or discordance, none gives the impression of an inhumanized man more than that of an ape who would humanize himself. This discomfort comes from the fact that Australanthropes are in reality less ape-faced men than brain-boxed men defying humanity. We were prepared to admit everything except that we started with our feet” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 97). Later Lucy’s discovery in 1974 proved him right; Australanthropes were bipedal. This was not only important against the “cerebralist prejudice”, for the adventure of the human race is indeed the adventure of its body, of the slow formation of its body.

It must be stressed that Leroi-Gourhan took leave of the notion of “natural man”. In fact, it has always been the starting point for speculation about the origin of man. According to Nietzsche, man and his soul are the product of a suppression of instincts that belongs to the natural man. In Freud’s work, we find the great myth of “Totem and taboo” according to which the natural man becomes the civilized man by repressing the murder of the “primal father”. And according to Darwin, man is basically a “natural man” in the sense that his abilities or qualities are gradually formed in relation to other animals⁴. On the other hand, man is formed by the “top”, by his mind or brain as in Lévi-Strauss’s (1963) view: “the original impulse which compelled men to exchange words must be sought for in that split representation that pertains to the symbolic function” (p. 62). The unasked question is therefore how the human body became a human body. And instead of wondering how to understand the evolution of the human brain, Darwin wandered into psychological speculations about feelings in humans and animals. For his part, Lévi-Strauss presented us with a symbolic function without genealogy. This is why Leroi-Gourhan’s work represents a major advance over the dominant images of man; anthropology must be transformed into what did not exist in Darwin’s time, paleoanthropology.

2.2. The human body

When one theoretically studies a living body, the crux of the matter is easily forgotten. Anatomy and physiology largely occupy the scientific scene, and the fact that a body breathes, eats, moves, flees, etc., becomes secondary. Curiously, a body’s vital functions seem to be subordinated to the organs of the body. To explain the organs of a body is to explain the functions of a body. But it is always the organ that is primordial, and the function is comparable to a predicate that is subordinate to the subject of the sentence. The originality of Leroi-Gourhan’s work was to dissect the living differently. A body has an organic (anatomical) side and a functional side. The two are linked, but they are not reduced to each other. Locomotion, nutrition (and grasping) and relationship (perception) are the three major functions: “(They) are linked from the first manifestations of animal life, so closely that any change in one of the terms presupposes those of the other two. More precisely, the functional whole corresponds to a rigorously synergistic whole. Although Cuvier, from the beginning of paleontology, in formulating the law of correlations, made this synergistic character of animal organizations perfectly clear, the analysis of the organs prevailed over the study of the functions or the functional whole” (Leroi-Gourhan 1983, p. 71).

Underlining the difference between organ and function implies that the living is doubly articulated. This is why “function” does not directly mean the function of an organ. It is not a question of saying that the function of the eyes is to see or that the function of the legs is to walk as if it were somehow a property or faculty of an organ. The eyes are organs, seeing is a function, and the function is not given in the organ that corresponds to it. Legs are organs, walking is a function and function does not automatically follow organs. In order to walk, the child needs to see others who walk standing up (“the wolf child” walking on all four legs), and to see, light is also needed (the child who does not see light – his eyes are glued shut, for example – becomes blind). A function can also move from one organ to another, such as the grasping that moves from the mouth to the forelimbs. Methodically, the distinction allowed Leroi-Gourhan to approach evolution from two perspectives: there is a “functional paleontology” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 57) and a “body paleontology” (of organs). He thus succeeded in highlighting lineages of evolution without going through zoological species. In relation to grasping, he divided mammals into two classes: those that had mouths as grasping instruments and those that also (but not exclusively) used the forelimbs. The former were mainly “walkers”, and the latter mainly “arboreal” (such as apes). Compared to these two series, man represents an original solution: “The essential feature lies in locomotion: man has a foot that can be imagined as arboreal in the very distant past, but which, as early as the Australopithecus, appears to be adapted to walking on the ground. In other words, the human foot has undergone evolution in the same direction as walking mammals, whereas his hand has undergone the maximum possible evolution in the grasping directions. This anatomical paradox reflects the complete separation between the forelimb and the organs of locomotion, the standing position during walking, the vertebral straightening, characteristics which are all originally human” (Leroi-Gourhan 1983, pp. 75–76). But there are of course relationships between “the bodily device” and the “functional device” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, pp. 57–58).

In order to fully understand the evolution, it must be stressed that this relationship was not synchronized. The forelimbs did not transform into hands for a later grasping function. The living being that became bipedal freed the forelimbs from locomotion. Also bipedalism is an anatomical cause of change of the forelimbs. It is a mechanical causality without purpose and without function. In a way, the hands are new organs compared to the old “body device”. An organ is created without a previously given purpose. This distinction (between causes and functions (finality)) accounts for the chance linked to evolution, so that something new happens that is not contained in a previous phase. The hand – a new organ – thus subsequently opened up a new world through the functions that it gradually assumed. Here, there was no “design” – intelligent or mechanical – given in advance. It is better to say that the hand is the greatest surprise produced by evolution. It is the liberation of the hand (from locomotion) that is at the origin of the human adventure.

The function and the effects of the function came later. The hand profoundly transformed man’s physical and functional apparatus. On a functional level, grasping moved from the mouth to the hand that became the exclusive grasping organ. There followed a “liberation” of the head and mouth. It was no longer used for grasping and then became lighter; the mandible is less strong and the teeth are smaller. The mechanical link between the mandible and the spine weakened and the skull (slowly) released a larger volume for the brain: “The arch literally opened like a fan. The deployment of the head range was not uniform (Figure 42): the forehead was contained in its proportions by the facial mass of which it provided the foundation, and it was not until ‘Homo sapiens’ that the prefrontal cortex developed... The standing position, as early as the Australopithecus, has as its corollary an increase in the surface area of the head range in the middle fronto-temporo-parietal region” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 110). The change in the body implied a change in the skull, which in turn led to an enlargement of the brain. Obviously, the brain cannot be the cause of its own enlargement, nor can this enlargement be explained in terms of a pressure to develop an intelligence necessary for the survival of the species. As with the hand, the evolutionary path must be distinguished from the functions that the brain takes on once the “evolutionary ceiling” has been reached. Indeed, for the survival of the species, brain enlargement is rather useless as it requires too much energy. Evolution has created a living being with a brain that becomes far too large for its size.

In a recent book, Qu’est-ce que le vivant, Alain Prochiantz points out that in relation to our weight (comparable to the great apes) “we are 900 cubic centimeters too much”: “The brain is used to move and connects the sensory world with the motor world. I move or remain motionless because I see or hear, feel, desire... Because of this, there is a linearity in primates, between the size of the body and the size of the brain. However, this relationship between the chimpanzee, the gorilla or the orangutan is lost as soon as one passes through the hominids (‘Homo habilis’, ‘Homo erectus’, ‘Homo neanderthalis’, etc.). The extreme point of this anomaly is reached with Sapiens, which has a brain of 1,400 cubic centimeters when 500 would be more than enough, given its size, for the sensory-motor functions of a basic primate. In short, to put it in a nutshell, we have 900 cubic centimeters ‘too much’”. (Prochiantz 2012, pp. 85–86, author’s translation)

Also, the brain played its major role only with the advent of “Homo sapiens”. “It is surprising that the importance of the brain’s volume only comes into play afterwards. In reality, it is difficult to give pre-eminence to this or that character, because everything is linked in the development of species, but it seems certain to me that brain development is in some way a secondary criterion. It plays, when mankind is acquired, a decisive role in the development of the species, but it is certainly, in terms of strict evolution, correlative of the standing position and not, as has long been believed, primordial” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 33).

The opposite position implies an amalgamation of organs and functions. An organ is explained by its function and a function by its organ. Thus, a functionalist explanation becomes common in biology. In Darwin’s view, the function of an organ is explained by virtue of its usefulness in the face of environmental pressure. Explaining the evolution of the brain in the manner of Leroi-Gourhan is therefore excluded and given the immediate non-utility of this evolution, this enlargement would not have taken place. Why did human beings and their brains grow during their evolution? Is there a utility or an advantage that can explain it? Or is it due to mechanical causes, such as a change in food, the control of fire to prepare food, or climate change? Leroi-Gourhan’s interest is in opting for the latter. It follows that the theory of “natural selection” cannot explain the evolution of the brain. It is not increased in function of a utility because at the beginning its increasing volume was rather an obstacle (requiring too much energy). In fact, Darwin, so preoccupied with utility, projected a current utility of an organ on what should explain the emergence of this organ. He thus assumed a continuity of evolution that enclosed it in a “metaphysics of utility” explaining everything and nothing.

The “biological originality of man” (Leroi-Gourhan 1983, p. 68) is an originality that is not visible from a physiological or anatomical perspective because the primordial fact is the morphology (shape) of the human body; its standing position, hands free while walking, a body that can run and throw stones (at the same time), etc. (Leroi-Gourhan 1983, p. 68). In fact, form (morphology) is the link between organs and functions. Thus, the morphology of the body is the context accounting for techniques, from biological fact (in the morphological sense) everything that concerns man derives; techniques, language, thought and images. Placing man in the evolution of living beings places him in the natural order but in a way that radically breaks with our usual conceptions of the human being.

2.3. The hand and the tool

In the course of human evolution, the hand became the grasping organ and, by its form, it became a tool itself; the human being does something with his hands. Technicality is not added to the hand, but is linked to what a hand can do: “The tool does not appear intrusively as if it were superimposed on an operational framework already virtually constituted, it emerges in a way from the hand in the very movement of its liberation” (Leroi-Gourhan 1983, p. 253). This is why the making of a tool is not the product of thought: “On a philosophical level, the problem of human technicality could thus be considerably modified; it would appear not as a consequence of ‘intelligence’ with its currents and waves, but as the result of the accession to a highly organized motricity, as the product of a new bodily conditioning. Technicity would not wait until the thinking brain has already accomplished a long ascent; it would only take advantage of the evolution of increasingly richly organized brain territory to take on more and more reflective forms” (Leroi-Gourhan 1983, p. 250). This is not to say that the tool is exclusively human (of course not), but to understand that for 2 million years the development of tools followed a “geological rhythm”. From the primitive flint to the two-sided flint, the rhythm was the same as that which followed the enlargement of the brain’s volume: “Up to the Upper Paleolithic threshold, the course of progress seemed to be molded on the ‘geological’ rhythm, and no longer on the ‘historical’ rhythm. It is quite obvious that there was no discontinuity between the biological and the technological, but rather an increasingly accelerated divergence” (Leroi-Gourhan 1983, p. 255).

It goes without saying that this development was not just an effect on the hand. More profoundly “the tool appears as a true anatomical consequence, the only outcome of a human being who has become, in terms of his hand and his teeth, completely inert and whose brain is organized for manual operations of a complex nature” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 129). The tool is linked to its survival because with the tool the hand could obtain a strength and technique that it did not possess alone. It extended the hand but not in an artificial way since it is part of the hand and its technique. “A stone is shattered by a hand and the hand thus becomes human” (Leroi-Gourhan 1983, p. 70).

On the other hand, the hand became a human hand by the fact that the tool became detached or dissociated from it. The hand leaves the tool in its place and it retains its character as a tool; it is not just any stone. The tool that extends the hand is also a tool that detaches from the hand: “The human hand is human by what detaches from it and not by what it is: a fairly simple osteo-muscular device...” (Leroi-Gourhan 1965, p. 41). Detached from the hand, the tool is removable. If it extends the body, its character as a tool also puts it outside the body. In the animal, the tool and the organ merge. “The crab’s claw and its mandibular parts merge with the operating program through which the animal’s acquisition behavior is expressed” (Leroi-Gourhan 1965, p. 35). In humans, on the other hand, the removable tool is an external organ. In this sense, the tool is the first element of the human functional system that is externalized. After the liberation of the hand (the liberation of an organ) came the “liberation” of the tool, which was a technical “liberation” within the functional system of man: “All human evolution contributed to placing outside man that which in the rest of the animal world responded to specific adaptation. The most striking material fact was certainly the ‘liberation’ of the tool...” (Leroi-Gourhan 1965, p. 34). The fact that the tool made by the hand is removable, that is to say, in an exteriority with respect to the human body, implies that technical gestures can be repeated with the same tool, which will thus be linked to a memory and a project (for example, the project to use the same object later). The tool separates both from the body and from an external object to which it is applied. More fundamentally, before the tool – as a removable object – there was no such separation between the body and the world of objects.

This is why the externalization of the tool does not refer to an interiority that pre-existed it. It is primordial. However, exteriority is only one aspect of the mode of being of a technical object. It fully exists only in a technical fact and a technical gesture. The tool is only a tool inside a gesture that manipulates an object in a temporal sequence where the before and after (one must do X before Y, etc.) are crucial: “Technique is both gesture and tool, organized in a chain by a real syntax that gives the operating series both their fixity and their flexibility” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 164). Also, the technical gesture creates a “technical intelligence” linked to a memory. Although it is instrumental, it is a mistake to be blinded by the instrumentality of a technical gesture. What is crucial is what a technical course means and what the category of tool as well as that of technical gesture imply in general for the human being. In fact, it is the technical gesture that in the evolution of Man will transform his functional device. It is the technical gesture that opens up to a non-genetic memory and a verbal language.

The technical gesture linked to a flexible syntax is rhythmic: “One of the operating characteristics of humanity, from its earliest stages, has been the application of rhythmic percussion, repeated at length. This operation is even the only one that marks the entrance of Australanthropic humanity, since it left as traces the choppers of shattered pebbles and polyhedral balls born from long hammering. From the outset, the manufacturing techniques are set in a rhythmic atmosphere, at once muscular, auditory and visual, born of the repetition of the gestures of shock” (Leroi-Gourhan 1965, p. 135). Rhythmic, the technical gesture is something other than a reaction of the hand in the face of danger. In terms of grasping, it assumes a certain independence from the other two functions; locomotion and relationship (perception). As the tool was externalized, the gesture became autonomous. This development can also be explained from the anatomy of the human body: “Throughout his evolution, from reptiles, Man appeared as the successor of those between creatures that have escaped specialization. Neither his teeth, nor his hands, nor his foot, nor finally his brain, reached the high degree of perfection of a mammoth’s teeth, a horse’s hand and foot, the brain of certain birds, so that he has remained capable of almost all possible actions, that he can eat practically anything, run, climb, and use the improbably archaic organ in his skeleton, the hand, for operations by a brain overspecialized in generalization” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 168). The hand that surpasses itself in technical gestures more generally shows a relative dissociation between the three moments of the functional device of mammals. It is no longer primarily a perception that triggers locomotion or grasping. The functions assume, on the other hand, a certain independence with respect to the organs with which they are associated in order to enter into synergy with the other functions. It is in this sense that the technical gesture appeals to the face – to the eyes and the voice.

2.4. Technique and language

The morphology of the human body implies that the hand–face relationship plays a fundamental role. From the technical gesture, the functions related to the face are transformed. It calls upon a gaze that knows how to follow it and a voice that knows how to memorize it. This presupposes a head freed from grasping and more precisely a mouth freed for speech. Leroi-Gourhan’s argument is that the development of techniques was impossible without a certain language. The problem is that speech has left no fossils. How can we carry out a “paleontology of language” without a call to a mysterious origin? Instead of seeking an origin, he undertook “the account of the geological relations between technique and language” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 11). Without “fossil languages”, a comparison with apes was necessary in order to better define the hand–face relationship, essential for a “paleontology of language”. “The ape works with its lips, teeth, tongue and hands, just as present-day man speaks with his lips, teeth, tongue and gesticulates or writes with his hands... In other words, from a formula identical to those of the primates, man makes concrete tools and symbols, both of which are part of the same process or rather use the same basic equipment in the brain” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964). The plasticity of the brain – which was created in the course of its evolution – has given rise, from the hand-face relationship, to the cerebral link between tool and language. They are “linked neurologically” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 163), just as, in terms of thought, “the hand and the voice remain closely united” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 298).

Hence, language has developed in line with the evolution of techniques. “At those stages when the comparative study of tools and skulls seems to show that the industry developed at a rate corresponding to that of biological evolution, the level of language could only be very low, but it certainly exceeded the level of vocal signals” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 163). While the gorilla possesses vocal signals, it is the character of the removable and externalized tool that seems to imply a human speech that breaks with the world of signals. “Indeed, what characterizes ‘language’ and ‘technique’ in apes is their spontaneous appearance under the effect of an external stimulus and their no less spontaneous abandonment or failure to appear if the material situation that triggers them ceases or does not manifest itself. The manufacture of the chopper or the biface is a very different mechanism, since the manufacturing operations pre-existed at the time of use and since the tool persisted with a view to subsequent actions” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 164). It is precisely this specificity of the technique that imposes a ‘technical intelligence’ that through a word can cover ‘the operating chains’ and also recognize the tools that can be used later. “These are technical activities that are unthinkable without a verbalized intellectual fixation” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 298).

Even if the tool can be seen as the first symbol just as technique is already a kind of language (or embedded in a language), the essential thing is that the language developed from the technique in a way that demonstrates a hijacking of it in the end. The technical gesture and the tool prefigured the very form of speech as an orality that is distinct from a communication of signals. As the technical gesture implied an externalization of the hand through the tool, speech implied an externalization of the mouth through the verbal symbol: “Speech is a verbal tool, isolable from the mouth that emits it, just as the manual tool is isolable from the hand” (Leroi-Gourhan 1983, p. 81). As the tool came from the hand, speech came from the mouth. A cry is part of a mouth that can signal danger but a word is only a word by being detached from the speaking voice. Without such an exteriority, it is not shared and heard as language. Like the tool, language is “removable” and externalized.

To understand this, the mouth in insolation can confuse us. In fact, speech is isolated from the mouth by means of the ear. Speech does not occur if it is not initially related to the ear or hearing. The sound emitted is sound only received or heard. That is why speech also does not refer to an interiority that pre-exists it and that it is supposed to express. But where the tool works an object, speech works nothing – except itself. There is not an organ of speech and the birth of language was not from an organ, either the vocal apparatus or the brain. If we speak of an “organ of language” (as in Chomsky’s case), we do not admit the essential distinction between organ and function. For Leroi-Gurhan, there is a linguistic and symbolic function, not linguistic and symbolic organs. Such a function is of course articulated on the body. The relationship between articulation (mouth) and perception (hearing) has a physiological basis in the relationship between voice and hearing. Speech is articulated on this relationship and becomes possible when perception dominates (and governs) the articulation. This phenomenon can be called self-affection in the sense that with speech the body affects itself.

The exteriority of speech also distinguishes it from the world (otherwise it would have been only a signal). The tool and the word imply a distance “between man and the inner and outer environment in which he is immersed”. This detachment “is expressed in the separation of the tool from the hand and the word from the object” (Leroi-Gourhan 1965, p. 33). “The most striking material fact is certainly the ‘liberation’ of the tool, but in reality the fundamental fact is the liberation of the verb and this property of placing its memory outside itself, in the social organism” (Leroi-Gourhan 1965, p. 34). In short, a gap appears between man and his environment, which characterizes “the faculty of symbolization, or more generally this property of the human brain, which is to maintain a distance between the lived experience and the organism that supports it” (Leroi-Gourhan 1965, p. 33). It should be emphasized that this distance or gap (from the world) is not simply postulated. On the one hand, it is an externalization of the body that produces a distance both from the body and from the world and, on the other hand, what is externalized – the tool, the word – is precisely what affects the body. Instead of a relationship that goes from the body (the subject) to the world or from the world to the body, the characteristic of a human world consists of the circularity that characterizes its functional device: externalizations that in turn can only affect and shape the human body. By the same movement, it is also the world that becomes an external world through the tool and through speech: “In other words, since at a human scale the technical function is externalized in the removable tool, since the perceived object also becomes external in a verbal symbol, the movement in all its visual, auditory and motor forms is also liberated and enters into the same evolutionary cycle” (Leroi-Gourhan 1965, p. 87).

2.5. Language and visualization

After the tool and the word, a third step led directly to Sapiens. Next to flints or tools, the paleontologist finds new types of objects: ornamental objects, dyes (such as ochre) or objects with lines carved into the bone or stone. It is as if the word goes back to the hand and transforms it into a graphic hand, i.e. a hand that draws and traces. Let us quote: “Graphic figuration was born with the first development of ‘Homo sapiens’, which is a precious indication” (Leroi-Gourhan 1965, p. 209). For “nothing comparable to the tracing and reading of symbols existed until the dawn of ‘Homo sapiens’” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 262). In the beginning, this figuration (visualization) was directly related to speech or, more generally, to orality. This is why it is strictly speaking non-figurative and why it is rather about “the oldest rhythmic manifestations expressed; no precise meaning is any longer graspable in these very modest witnesses” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 263). Also, “the oldest known figures do not represent hunting, dying animals or touching family scenes; they are graphic pegs, the material of an oral context that has been irretrievably lost” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 266).

One could say that they are figures that serve to give a foundation to speech, a bit like the rhythmic series of sticks. In any case, it is a form of language and not ornaments without deeper meaning. As a language, figuration also brings into play the hand–face couple in the sense that the graphic hand refers to vision: “On the two ends of the operating field, two languages are constituted, from the same sources, that of hearing which is linked to the evolution of the territories coordinating sounds, and that of vision which is linked to the evolution of the territories coordinating gestures translated into graphic symbols” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 270). “It is therefore obvious that from the source, phonation and graphics serve the same purpose” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 269). The phonic gesture and the graphic gesture express (both) something. While one is related to hearing, the other is related to seeing. This means that to the ear that hears (understands) corresponds eyes that read. The phonation-graphics couple thus refers to the same transformation of human vision and hearing. It is important to underline this since it is easy to forget that figuration (graphics in general) refers to a vision that can read, not in the sense that one reads a piece of writing (this happens much later), but in the sense that the vision reads and understands traces or marks – paintings. It follows from this that neither the word nor the figure are “layers of reality”. The image or figure exists only through the graphic hand, just as the word exists only in the articulation–hearing relationship. This is why the first figurative art “was a symbolic transposition and not a layer of reality, that is to say that there was between the line in which one admitted seeing a buffalo and the buffalo itself the distance that existed between the word and the object” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 266). The expression “and not a layer of reality” means that the figure is an externalization like that of the tool and the word. The technical gesture, the verbal gesture and the graphic gesture are the three externalizations that mark the functional device of man.

How can we explain a vision that can read without reacting immediately to what it sees or to what moves (a danger or a promise of food)? First of all, with a raised head turned toward the horizon and not toward the ground, vision and hearing are dominant senses in humans. “In man, among the senses of relationship, olfaction is in a special position. Indeed, vision and hearing engaged in language, like the hand, enter alone into the system of transmission and reception which makes the exchange of figurative symbols possible. Olfaction, purely receptive, has no additional organ for the emission of odor symbols. It remains foreign to the most characteristic human device” (Leroi-Gourhan 1965, p. 112). A dog’s world is perhaps one of smells. Olfaction does not refer to an organ that knows how to express a smell, whereas vision refers to an organ that knows how to express what we see, namely the graphic hand or the verbal gesture. Thus, a reception (perception) translates into an emission. But an emission (through speech, through the graphic gesture) only exists when it is perceived (received) and this means that the “system of emission and reception” refers to a more fundamental fact linked to the articulation–perception couple. On the other hand, this shows the originality of olfaction as is a perception unrelated to an articulation in a sense that can open an “involuntary memory” (as stressed by Marcel Proust).

The articulation of the technical gesture is linked to its perception through vision, and the articulation of speech is linked to its hearing. Here, there is not a motricity that conditions what is done, which is the cause of the result of the motricity. In general, it is the sensory–motor schema (linked to causality) that is excluded: “If in the technique and language of the totality of Anthropians (the human species before Sapiens) motricity conditioned the expression (as, for example, the primitive tool), in the figurative language of the most recent Anthropians reflection determined the graphics” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 262). The motricity of the hand is not enough, it is transformed into a graphic hand by its link to reflection. Here “reflection” means both perception and reflection, as if what the hand produced was reflected in the vision or a “reflective perception”. Therefore, perception (reflection) dominates the articulation of the graphic hand, just as hearing dominates the speaking gesture. This relationship is not a cause–effect relation. Rather, there is a simultaneity between the graphic hand and the perception that follows it; the gaze dominates the drawing hand.

Thus, vision and hearing open up to a “symbolic reflection” that the other senses do not recognize (Leroi-Gourhan 1965, p. 209). Images and words are the “symbolic reflections” of hearing and seeing. It is through the specificity of seeing and hearing that man reflects reality in verbal, gestural or figured symbols (Leroi-Gourhan 1965, p. 206). At the same time, he can only reflect himself in his own externalizations, that is, seeing, hearing and feeling himself. The image or the word is also a mirror. Leroi-Gourhan notes in this connection the fascination with objects that shine and reflect; “the crystals that cast fires directly touch the depths of man’s reflected thought” (Leroi-Gourhan 1965, p. 214). For “the unusual in form, which is a powerful source of figurative interest, exists only where the subject confronts an organized image of his universe of relation with the objects that enter his field of perception” (Leroi-Gourhan 1965, p. 214). The image and the figurative also represent a difference in relation to speech:

Graphic symbolism benefits, in relation to phonetic language, from a certain independence. Its content is expressed in the three dimensions of space what phonetic language expresses in the single dimension of time. At the level where we are still situated, the link between language and graphic expression is one of coordination and not of subordination. The image then possesses a dimensional freedom that will always be lacking in writing (Leroi-Gourhan 1965, p. 272).

The image is “radiant” and there is a profound link between multidimensional graphics and mythology. In general, mythology, ritual and magic are not distinguished from language but are part of it. It is we who make the distinction, since our way of thinking is very different from that of the Paleolithic. Leroi-Gourhan observes: “The longest part of the evolution of ‘Homo sapiens’ took place in forms of thought that have become foreign to us, even though they still underlie an important part of our behavior. While we live in the practice of a single language, whose sounds are inscribed in a writing associated with them, we can hardly conceive of the possibility of a mode of expression in which thought graphically has a sort of radiant organization” (Leroi-Gourhan 1965, p. 273). Mythology and esthetics here refer to each other in a way that expresses emotions and emotional bonds: “The fundamental link between art and religion is emotional, but not in a vague way, it is closely linked to the conquest of a mode of expression that restores the true situation of man in a cosmos in which he is inscribed as the center and which he does not try to penetrate by the line of reasoning in which the letters make thought a penetrating line, of long range, but as thin as a thread” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, pp. 273–275). It is the “penetrating line” of the writing of characters that presupposes our logic and that prelogical thought does not know⁵.

In other words, paleontology exempts us from starting with thought and logic. Here everything begins with the body and the senses of the body, more precisely with a vertical and bipedal body. Otherwise, we link vision or language to thought (to the intelligible), forgetting the hand and the technical gesture. Technique – the “techné” – thus becomes subordinate to thought, and our philosophy ends up oscillating between mentalism and cerebralism. It should be added that this system of thought has no place for a “functional device” that is inserted between man and his world. The same is true of the neo-Darwinian paradigm where functions are swallowed up by their organs – just as the brain swallows up thought. Perhaps our difficulty here is linked to our dominant conception of language that dissociates language from perception and articulation.

In short, the human body becomes a human body by freeing itself. In this way, its functional device is created, articulated on its organs but without being reducible to the organs of the body. It is rather a rhythmic body: “The functional whole of man is also a rhythmic device” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 263), thus a body that moves and dances. This device can be considered as a triangle (Leroi-Gourhan 1965, p. 86) that is made up of three extremes: technical gesture, verbal gesture and graphic gesture; the tool, the word and the figure. But given the intrinsic relationships between the three extremes, it is more accurate to say that this device can be interpreted in three different ways: from the symbolic, gesticulation, speech and figures are part of language. From the technical, it refers to figures and speech as its necessary dimensions. And from the esthetic point of view, figuration and rhythm dominate.

This device is of course not antinomic in relation to the body. It should be recalled that the body is both organic and functional; doubly articulated in a way that characterizes the living in general. When the functional device can be characterized as grammatical (Leroi-Gourhan speaks of syntax), the anatomical body follows the mechanics of cause and effect. In this context, the brain is not an organ like any other. It is the organ that connects and coordinates functions; an organ of coordination and interaction. It “doubles” speech – as one of its materials – but it is not the cause of speech. Direct causality only intervenes in the case of a dysfunction. Thus, we can perhaps propose the hypothesis that due to the brain (and its plasticity) extended by a device that is both distinct and linked to it, man is first and foremost “Grammatical Man” and that there is no “Neural Man” who can explain this.

2.6. Memory and history

The problem of human evolution is simply memory. In order for human groups to survive it is not only necessary that they develop techniques, but that these techniques are transmitted. In short, the challenge was to create a collective memory that both provides a link to the past and consolidates the group through a common memory. From “Homo sapiens”, the constitution of a social memory apparatus dominates all the problems of human evolution (Leroi-Gourhan 1965, p. 24). It is evolution that required man – alongside his genetic memory – to create a new and unique memory, a collective memory. This memory no longer belongs to the species but to a group: “Breaking the link between the species and memory appears to be the only solution (and a human-only solution) that leads to rapid and continuous evolution” (Leroi-Gourhan 1965, p. 23). This is why Sapiens mark the advent of a historical time different from “geological time”. Speaking of societies without history or before history rather shows our way of linking history to change. But the first societies up to the Neolithic revolution – agriculture – had found the means to maintain and transmit their memory: we must repeat ourselves. That for 30,000 years not much happened shows the success of the first Sapiens groups.

The main instrument of non-genetic memory is language. It is perhaps at its core a memory technique – a mnemonic. In any case, it is a condition of our memory. On the one hand, language is in itself transmission, it only exists as a transmission of the past, and, on the other hand, through speech, myths maintain the link to the past and to the knowledge that is transmitted from ancestors: “once upon a time”. Thus, the past assumes a reality that without language could not exist. Language comes to us from the past and with language we speak of the past. In short, language is the historical phenomenon par excellence. This of course presupposes the exteriority of language, for the memory of which Leroi-Gourhan speaks is an externalized memory; it belongs to the group. After the “liberation of the hand”, we have the “liberation of memory”. If the genetic memory proper to the species is given in the individuals that constitute it, the memory proper to man, on the other hand, is given (externalized) in his group. His memory is placed outside himself, in the social organism or in its functional system. The tool, the word and the figure are at the same time bearers of a memory and produced due to the same memory. When they change, the shape of the memory changes as well.

History implies that ethnic groups replaces species (Leroi-Gourhan 1965, p. 12): hence the dispersal and differentiation of Sapiens in different corners of the globe. Similarly, technological evolution becomes more important than biological evolution. Starting from the founding triangle (above), history starts to become “dynamic” from the technical externalizations of tools, speech and figures (the images). Tools are externalized in machines, speech is externalized in writing or letters, and images are externalized by visual technologies. Later these externalizations will find a common language through electronics, and they are somehow coming together on the computer screen. At this stage, it is perhaps the brain itself that will externalize itself in a supercomputer; the memory being transformed into mechanical memory like the memory of a computer. Thus, we have three successive externalizations of memory through orality, writing and finally through electronics.

2.7. Conclusion

In this situation – ours – the body as it was as the Sapiens’ starting point risks becoming obsolete. Subsequent externalizations (liberations) risk becoming autonomous in a way that no longer depends on a body. Rather, the body becomes a somewhat embarrassing supplement to an external brain. So what is the fate of “Homo sapiens”? “Freed from his tools, his gestures, his muscles, the programming of his acts, his memory, freed from his imagination by televised means ... the ‘Homo sapiens’ of zoology is probably near the end of his career ... . The great problem of the world already present is to be solved: how will this obsolete mammal, with the archaic needs that drove its ascent, continue to push its rock up the slope if all it has left one day is the image of its reality” (Leroi-Gourhan 1965, p. 266). Leroi-Gourhan’s scenario is not so much that man has become a well-programmed machine. Rather, the hypothesis is that man has externalized himself into machines guided by the same forms of programs. In this sense, his body no longer has a real or perceived reality, but exists only as an “image of his own reality” – thus unrealized.

If one has difficulty understanding this possibility, there is of course a reason. Perhaps our dominant ways of thinking fits perfectly with such a possibility. We need only mention the notion of program. Programs produce images, texts and goods. Not to mention genetic programs. An American philosopher, Daniel Dennet, has even conceptualized natural selection according to Darwin as a program that explains evolution in the form of algorithms (Dennet 1995, p. 82). Against such a theory, empirical research – with empirical results – that show that evolution is much more complicated seems to be falling flat. In conclusion, the neo-Darwinian paradigm is weak empirically and strong theoretically by assuming a dominant system of thought making the following question obligatory: “Which genetic mutations have led to the increase in brain size?” (Prochiantz 2012, p. 102, author’s translation). Never the less Prochiantz adds: “Let us note here that this cerebral increase may not be independent of other changes... I could have written about bipedalism and the liberation of the hand” (Prochiantz 2012, p. 102, author’s translation). But even if he is unable to do that, his great merit is to try – to try to crack the neo-Darwinian framework. As the following quotation shows: “The physicalist and mechanistic ideologies that have, until recently, imposed a straitjacket on the life sciences” (Prochiantz 2012, p. 140, author’s translation). He tries but he can’t – this system of thought is too strong even for him. To achieve this, we must celebrate the divorce between molecular biology and paleontology (the biology of evolution). Stephen Gould has moved cautiously in this direction, but for Leroi-Gourhan this marriage did not even take place. That is why he occupied an invisible theoretical field.

As we have underlined, he excludes a utility that can explain the evolution of the brain or language. Assuming such a utility, there would be no problem of meaning or sense. One becomes incapable of explaining the origin of language except by the myth that poses genetic mutations. Alternatively, we can affirm that this origin is indeed a “mystery”. This incapacity shows the other side of a conception of language that excludes the symbolic in order to reduce language to the digital or to a “syntactic machine” in the brain. The danger that Leroi-Gourhan points out about the externalizations of our brain and of our language thus becomes invisible to a mainstream of modern thought that thinks about language on the basis of such externalizations. It follows that a specificity of man does not exist. On the one hand, we only extend what is found in animals; on the other hand, we are extended by new technologies. So the symbolic does not exist. Man can disappear and this disappearance can be supported (or encouraged) by our ignorance and blindness. This is why Leroi-Gourhan is more topical than ever. He reminds us that the symbolic function conceived as “the ability to reflect reality in verbal or gestural symbols, or materialized by figures” (Leroi-Gourhan 1965, p. 214) is proper to man.