Leroi-Gourhan; or, Hands and the Ends of the Human

Andre Leroi-Gourhan, second from right, with fellow archaeologists outside the Altxerri cave, 1966.

In 1964, three years before I started dreaming of becoming an archaeologist, Andre Leroi-Gourhan published La geste et la parole (Gesture and Speech). That is a mostly meaningless coincidence, except for the fact that Leroi-Gourhan begins the book by reflecting on the same question that was soon going to preoccupy my eight-year-old self — the question of human origins. Having been himself preoccupied with the question for much of his professional career, he further wonders why the mystery of human origins matters at all, why it exerts such a powerful pull on the imagination. “When confronted with archaeological finds, almost all of us have a sense of returning to our past, and few, if given the opportunity, will resist the temptation to delve into the recesses of the earth like a child taking a toy to pieces” (1). Something there is in humans that compels us to search for origins, something that spans sophisticated scientific investigation and child-like curiosity. There is nothing uniquely modern about this curiosity. The first stories humans invented were origin myths. Or, going back father still, late Neanderthal man, Leroi-Gourhan goes on to say, might have begun “the quest for our mysterious origins,” since he  “had already begun to gather fossils and oddly-shaped stones” (G&S, 3). 

It might be wishful thinking on Leroi-Gourhan’s part to think that the stones and fossils found in Neanderthal sites were attempts to know, preserve, or connect with dead predecessors, hominin or otherwise. The words themselves — know, preserve, connect — are projections onto a void. Neanderthals, after all, lived in Europe and southwest Asia well before the first writing systems (circa 3000 BCE), although the last generations of their kind, before they went extinct, left petroglyphs, circa 38,000 BCE. We are here in a realm of uncertainty and speculation. But strip away everything that smacks of projection and you are still left with the bare and indisputable fact that underpins almost all of Leroi-Gourhan’s ideas. The Neanderthal was holding a rock; the early members of genus Homo held rocks in their hands. 

I am getting ahead of myself. Before the hominin started picking up rocks and carrying them around or shaping or throwing them in an intentional fashion, he or she had first to stand up. Bipedalism, Leroi-Gourhan maintains (and the point still holds today), is the first and most crucial distinguishing criteria common to all humans. “The situation of the human, thus appears to be conditioned by erect posture” (G&S, 19). 

He tells a story that is simple and straightforward. A hominin stands up. This frees her hands — frees them for “technical ability” (tool use), and for “gesture” (language). The big jaw and prominent fangs of the ape’s face are no longer necessary, now that hands can manipulate and break down food. Faces grow smaller. “Erect posture, short face, free hand during locomotion, and possession of moveable implements — those are truly fundamental criteria of humanity” (G&S, 19). Given these criteria and tens of thousands of years, Hominin becomes human. Its first species name (bequeathed 40,000 year later) is Australopithecus. 

Here we encounter a problem in narration. It’s a problem of scale. What Leroi-Gourhan must leave out in order to focus on those salient details! Hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary experimentation and change that happened so slowly as to be imperceptible and unimaginable, leaving in its wake the ashes and bones of ancestors and distant kin, thousands of generations of them striating off in different species or tribal lineages of ambiguous relationship. That’s the gulf between Leroi-Gourhan’s story of human evolution and its temporal and geographical stage. It must make us wonder what we are talking about, and what bearing it has on anything that could be said to have actually happened. (Nevertheless, it appears that something did happen, insofar as we are here and came from somewhere, continents of someones, and so we look into the dark pool of the past for a human reflection, motivated by a yearning for recognition that Leroi-Gourhan has already warned us about.) This is what it means to say that the project of narrating human origins is rendered almost impossible, or else laughably anthropomorphic, by the problem of scale. There is an incommensurability between change, posited as an origin, and a regress which, within our time frame, is practically infinite.

Let’s return to the story, understanding the extent to which it is a story, a condensed reconstruction of a millennia of ashes and shadows. It has only just begun. “Erect posture, short face, free hand . . .” With hands freed from locomotion, some primates developed more precise and efficient uses of their fingers, a deftness that improves as they work with sticks, stones and, bones. Manual operations become more complex, and in the process — here is the clincher — some primates grow larger brains (G&S, 56). Specifically, the cortical fan of higher primates ‘spreads’, opens up, allowing more space for the cerebral cortex and the skills that will be performed there —language, abstract thought, decision making. Leroi-Gourhan’s paleographic explanations of this brain growth are illustrated with drawings of mammalian skulls and jaws.

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: think of the infant moving his fingers in the air, pointing at something or nothing at all, as the case may be. Child development psychologists have discovered that neural wirings are formed with feedback from those erratic manual movements, hand and brain in a dialogue of discovery and growth.

Phylogenetically, human intelligence depends on a widening piece of cerebral pie, slicing down to the center of the skull, roughly to the pineal gland, where Descartes, not inappropriately, located the soul. 

It moves inwards, but it moves outwards as well; human evolution carves space deep inside the skull and its recesses, and it extends outwards, via hands, into tool use, constructed things and spaces, language, and memory. It cannot do one without the other. Inner space and external space are simultaneously tenanted by humanness. They become human-stained territories, furnished with thoughts, words, judgements, and their material manifestations — tools, operational sequences, and drawn marks and images. 

Thus conceived, human evolution is revolutionized. The inward development has a finite neuromuscular limit which was reached some 100,000 years ago. There is nowhere else for zoological ‘growth’ to go (though zoological loss, Leroi-Gourhan muses — the genetic shedding of ossified appendages — is not inconceivable). On the other hand, the outward movement of human evolution seems to know no bounds. He calls it the externalization of memory — ethnic evolution. This encompasses all of the still-expanding means for recording and transmitting skills and stories — craftsmanship, depiction, language, buildings, cities, genealogical records — everything with which humans make a world, infuse themselves into it, and objectify their existence past individual death, simply by (in the simplest original form) extending a hand outwards and making or marking on an object.

Randall White, in his introduction to Gesture and Speech, describes this as “the manual creation of a material culture that is extracorporeal” (2). Or, in Leroi-Gourhan’s own words, “evolution has entered upon a new stage, that of the exteriorization of the brain, and from a strictly technological point of view the mutation has already been achieved”(G&S, 252).

With the idea of exteriorization as ongoing human evolution, beyond the zooomorphic into the technical and cultural, Leroi-Gourhan builds a metanarrative of human history, one that spreads from reindeer hunters to astronauts, sometimes in the same sentence. Remember, he lived in a mental theater of archaeological time, where it’s only a split second between reindeer hunters and astronauts, and thus much of the historical nuance that moderns identify with scholarly sobriety is condensed out of narrative existence. Remember, too, he was writing in the 1960s, a great time for metanarratives; Marxism, Freudianism, Darwinism, all the modern “isms” that Foucault identifies as discourses, internally complete and self-replicating systems of thought, had tremendous power. Leroi-Gourhan bridled at the suggestion that his work fit into the metanarrative of technological determinism, though it requires concentration and careful parsing to extract him from that lot. Most “isms” prefer to look backwards, and keep their feet firmly planted towards the past. You don’t find much prophecy in the great founders of metanarrotological discourses, though their disciples might not shy away from extrapolating futures utopias and dystopias from the masters’ teachings.

Leroi-Gourhan was not afraid to go there. The human hand, he speculated, site of our early evolutionary advantage, might eventually wither and disappear, as externalization through technology spins farther and farther away from any required manual interface: 

The dwindling importance of the makeshift organ that is our hand would not matter a great deal if there were not overwhelming evidence to prove that its activity is closely related to the balance of the brain areas with which it is connected. ‘Being useless with one’s fingers’, ‘being ham-fisted’, is not a very alarming thing at the level of the species as a whole: a good number of millennia will pass before so old an organ of our neuromotor apparatus actually regresses. But at the individual level, the situation is very different. Not having to ‘think with one’s fingers’ is equivalent to lacking a part of one’s normally, phylogenetically human mind (G&S, 255). 

This was written a mere fifty-five years ago, hardly the millennia requisite for a perceptible mutational drift, and yet it’s already apparent that Leroi-Gourhan could not have been more right, and more wrong. Who wouldn’t think now, when it comes to discussing manual activity, to distinguish between hands and fingers? You can be ham-fisted as hell, but rue the day that your digits don’t work to tap on keyboards and screens. How does the concentration of manual activity and skill in the fingertips affect the “brain areas” whose growth and pliancy is interlinked with the hand? If indeed, as Leroy-Gourhan says, the difference can manifest epigenetically, in the life of an individual, do our children become less or differently human by virtue of growing up, learning and playing both, as digital interfacers with multiple screens?  Would it be better or different if they spent more time in those traditionally full-handed activities of childhood — playing ball, climbing trees, learning to cook or sew or mow a lawn, or making boats out of milk cartons? Would it strengthen the thoughts and judgments that happen in those “brain areas” if we persisted in more manual activity through adulthood? 

I doubt it. It sounds like bad reductionism, the kind that results in erroneous and discriminatory ethical programs. 

And yet every night my president threatens wars and riles up racists with his fingertips. 

NOTES

1. Leroi-Gourhan, Andre, Gesture and Speech (French, 1964), trans. Anna Bostock Berger (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993); 3.  Subsequent references cited parenthetically as “G&S.”
2. White, Randall. “Introduction.” Andre Lero-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, xviii.