Leroi-Gourhan: Technical Trends and Human Cognition

Abstract

The work of Leroi-Gourhan (1911–1986) has had a strong impact on twentieth century French thought. To account for the origin of our human capacities of memory, anticipation and language, Leroi-Gourhan builds on a “Technology” understood as the study of the functional linkage between the organisms and their environment. In continuity with the biological world, without sudden event (by miracle or by chance), it is to explain the gradual separation of social memory by the interplay of technical innovations that will allow free thinking detached from the immediate situation. The fulcrum of this liberation is the tool: both a biological fact and a movable organ, it permits the passage from the biological world to the human world.