The Second Origin

When Leroi-Gourhan compares the capacities of Neanderthal man with those of Homo sapiens¹, Stiegler perceives a kind of inconsistency, as if symbolic intelligence were treated by Leroi-Gourhan as a new faculty added to technical intelligence, without our being able to interpret it as a direct extension of the latter. This leads Stiegler to think that Leroi-Gourhan appeals to a “second origin” of the human (the first being the one imagined by Rousseau), which occurs “inexplicably, if not providentially².”

This is a transformation at the end of which symbolic intelligence appears, understood by Leroi-Gourhan as what is proper to the human: “the faculty of symbolization, or more generally that property of the human brain which consists in maintaining a distance between lived experience and the organism that serves as its support³.” This new competence manifests itself in the appearance of body ornament, cave art, funerary rites and articulated language. It is one of the most sensitive moments of Leroi-Gourhan’s reflection, as he himself acknowledges: “The most personal problem that man can pose to himself is that of the nature of his intelligence, since ultimately he exists only through the consciousness he has of existing⁴.”

Stiegler regrets what he interprets as a rupture in Leroi-Gourhan’s analysis, a rupture that prevents the paleoanthropologist from truly capitalizing on the efforts that made it possible to clarify the emergence of technical intelligence:

Everything that is gained [that was gained by Leroi-Gourhan] through the analysis of “exteriorization” for understanding the emergence of the technical, insofar as it is not the fruit of a creative consciousness, is lost again as soon as a nontechnical intelligence is restored, one that is indeed considered creative⁵.

Yet for Stiegler, from the very first stages of hominization, the foundations of symbolic thought are, in his view, already present within technical evolution – but not only these. Indeed, if, as Leroi-Gourhan suggests, the human exists only through the consciousness it has of existing, that is, the consciousness of its mortality, Stiegler sees this consciousness as already present as soon as a form of anticipation appears – the anticipation required in toolmaking processes that involve sequences of complex operations⁶:

technical differentiation presupposes a full and complete anticipation, at once operative and dynamic, from the Australanthropian onward, and such an anticipation can only be a relation to death, which means that symbolic intellectuality must also already be there. Reflective intellectuality is not added to technical intelligence. It was already its ground⁷.

Stiegler proposes a more continuous, gradual and complex vision, in which technical mastery sees the appearance of a capacity for anticipation, which already constitutes the first signs of the consciousness of death and allows the symbolic to emerge in the interaction of the living with inert matter:

exteriorization, [which] must be understood less as a rupture with nature than as a new organization of life – life organizing the inorganic and thereby organizing itself within it⁸.

Stiegler thus conceives, with the appearance of the anticipation arising from technical intelligence, the establishment of symbolic intelligence in a relation to time. For his part, the philosopher Henri Van Lier underlines the importance of space in this movement leading toward symbolic intelligence. Indeed, for Van Lier, it is the taking of distance between tools that initiates symbolic functioning in the human, which he interprets as a passage from the tool to the signifier:

[…] technical objects, tools (…) refer to one another within panoplies and protocols. They do so first operatively, technically, as relays of an operation. But they can also do so by bracketing operativity, and therefore in a purely referential way, let us say semiotic⁹.

Within his Anthropogénie¹⁰, these signs, whose archaic model is the tool, confer an unprecedented power on the human, because they are generalizable and redistributable – thanks to the fact that they are “mentally light.” Yet these signs never forget, according to Van Lier, their technical origin¹¹, and in the last instance they never fail to evoke perceptions and technical tooling (for what the author calls indices), or else extensions, durations, angles, textures, compactnesses, evanescences, phasings, attractions-repulsions, etc., for what the author considers indexes¹². In Van Lier’s vast schema, all “our semiotic representations reduplicate our technical representations¹³.”

Grasped by Stiegler on the basis of time and by Van Lier on the basis of space, the gradual passage – and not one arising from a rupture, a discontinuity – from technical thought to symbolic thought has been increasingly accepted within paleoanthropological science, and supported by recent discoveries. Indeed, while the “cognitive revolution” postulates the radical appearance of symbolic capacities in Homo sapiens – associated with funerary, decorative and representational practices –, the presence of symbolic objects and behaviors among certain pre-sapiens, such as Homo erectus, is debated today¹⁴, while among Neanderthals the presence of the symbolic is now recognized¹⁵, despite Leroi-Gourhan’s skepticism in his time.

Thus, it is entirely possible today to envisage, on the scale of phylogenesis, the emergence of human symbolic functioning from the archaic experience of gesture in the face of the materiality of the world. This takes place by way of a technical intelligence whose operative spatiotemporal schemas were subjected to dynamics of generalization and abstraction, in a process in which socialization and communication must also have played a role.

1. Leroi-Gourhan already knew that Neanderthal man and Homo sapiens do not belong to the same branch in the evolution of hominids, an evolution that should be understood not linearly but as a ramification.↩︎

2. Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps, op. cit., p. 172.↩︎

3. André Leroi-Gourhan, Le Geste et la Parole, tome 2 : La Mémoire et les Rythmes. Paris : Albin Michel, 1988, p. 33.↩︎

4. André Leroi-Gourhan, Le Geste et la Parole, tome 1 : Technique et langage. Paris : Albin Michel, 1989, p. 150.↩︎

5. Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps, op. cit., p. 191.↩︎

6. A complexity that can be traced back at least to the Acheulean lithic industry (1.76 Ma - 200 ka) – associated with Homo erectus and later with Homo heidelbergensis – which already implies a “high degree of foresight in the course of technical operations,” in André Leroi-Gourhan, Le Geste et la Parole, tome 1 : Technique et langage, op. cit., p. 137.↩︎

7. Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps, op. cit., p. 192.↩︎

8. Ibid.↩︎

9. Henri Van Lier. Anthropogénie. Bruxelles : Impressions nouvelles, 2010, chap. 2.↩︎

10. To be understood as a form of metadiscipline that the author designates as a “theory of things,” aimed in particular at the constitution of the human (Homo) on the basis of concepts proposed as nodal in a vast and complex reflection: segment, panoply, protocol, thematization, indicialization and indexation. The complete work is available online. URL: https://anthropogenie.com, accessed 28/03/2025.↩︎

11. Ibid.↩︎

12. Ibid.↩︎

13. Ibid.↩︎

14. The engraved shell from Trinil, in Java, dated to about 500 ka, bears zigzag patterns suggesting a non-utilitarian act; see in this regard: Josephine C. A. Joordens Francesco d’Errico Frank P. Wesselingh et al., «Homo erectus at Trinil on Java used shells for tool production and engraving ». Nature [en ligne]. February 2015, vol. 518, n° 7538, p. 228–231. The use of red ochre by Homo erectus is also attested, although symbolic intention has not yet been established. This is the case, for example, of the objects found near the remains of Olduvai Hominid 9 in Tanzania (≃ 1.4 Ma) and of the objects found at European sites such as Terra Amata (≈ 400 ka). See in this regard: Ernst E. Wreschner Ralph Bolton Karl W. Butzer et al., «Red Ochre and Human Evolution: A Case for Discussion [and Comments and Reply] ». Current Anthropology [en ligne]. October 1980, vol. 21, n° 5, p. 631–644.↩︎

15. Possibly symbolic or ritual structures have been discovered, for example, in the Bruniquel cave, in France (≈ 176 ka); see in this regard: Jacques Jaubert Sophie Verheyden Dominique Genty et al., «Early Neanderthal constructions deep in Bruniquel Cave in southwestern France ». Nature [en ligne]. June 2016, vol. 534, n° 7605, p. 111–114. Likewise, deposits of deliberately assembled and often worked skulls have been found in the Cueva Des-Cubierta, in Spain (before 50 ka), interpreted as hunting trophies or ritual offerings; see in this regard: Enrique Baquedano Juan L. Arsuaga Alfredo Pérez-González et al., «A symbolic Neanderthal accumulation of large herbivore crania ». Nature Human Behaviour [en ligne]. January 2023, vol. 7, n° 3, p. 342–352. Furthermore, the probable use of perforated Spanish imperial eagle phalanges as pendants has been observed at the Cova Foradada, in Catalonia (≈ 40 ka); see in this regard: A. Rodríguez-Hidalgo J. I. Morales A. Cebrià et al., «The Châtelperronian Neanderthals of Cova Foradada (Calafell, Spain) used imperial eagle phalanges for symbolic purposes ». Science Advances [en ligne]. November 2019, vol. 5, n° 11, p. eaax1984.↩︎