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How Stone Tools Shaped Us: Post-Phenomenology and Material Engagement Theory

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Abstract

The domain of early hominin stone tool making and tool using abilities has received little scholarly attention in mainstream philosophy of technology. This is despite the fact that archeological evidence of stone tools is widely seen today as a crucial source of information about the evolution of human cognition. There is a considerable archeological literature on the cognitive dimensions of specific hominin technical activities. However, within archeology and the study of human evolution the standard perception is stone tools are mere products of the human mind (or brain or innate cognitive capacities). A number of recent approaches to cognition challenges this simplistic one-way-causal-arrow view and emphasizes instead the functional efficiency of tools or artifacts in transforming and augmenting human (or hominin) cognitive capacities. As a result, the very idea that tools or artifacts are intimately tied to human cognitive processes is fast becoming an alternative within the cognitive sciences and a few allied disciplines. The present study intends to explore its implications for philosophy of technology. The central objective of this paper is to examine the dynamic and intricate tool-mediated activities of the early hominins through the lens of Don Ihde’s post-phenomenological theory of human-technology relations and Lambros Malafouris’ Material Engagement Theory. Highlighting the key points where these two research approaches, despite their subtle nuances, converge and look capable of mutually catalyzing each other, the paper attempts to show why it is important to bring these approaches together for a more refined understanding of the controversial role these stone tools played in human evolution.

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Notes

  1. A few notable exceptions are Preston (1998) and Ihde (2007).

  2. The terms “artifacts” and “tools,” used interchangeably in this paper, stand for the tangible products of human activities (both physical and cognitive). They are manufactured or modified in response to some need, want, or desire to produce an intended result.

  3. This transformation of human self-experience, as we shall see in section II, entails the possibilities of a certain extension (or amplification) of experience as well as a reduction in (or alteration of) experience and thereby thwarts the human yearning for profound embodiment (Ihde 1979, 1990).

  4. Whether it is appropriate to group all the African Plio-Pleistocene stone assemblages dated between 2.6 and 1.6 Myr into one techno-cultural Oldowan complex and to ignore all inter-site differences is debatable (for details see Delagnes and Roche 2005).

  5. Leakey’s view has been questioned by contemporary scholars like Jeffares (2010a) who believes that Homo habilis definitely had tool using ancestors.

  6. When the whole foraging process (including its cognitive parts) strictly relies on the body-tool interaction and its properties and relationships being generated only through that interaction, it is called tool-dependent foraging (Bruner and Iriki 2016, p. 4).

  7. Beginners of course cannot experience this withdrawal or transparency of the tool.

  8. There is a wide array of technical actions in which the hands and arms play an important controlling role, as in using a computer key board. However, these technical actions do not qualify as manual forms of tool use because the movements of the human body play a peripheral, non-essential role with regard to the actual technical process and the forces involved (see Woelert 2014).

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  1. Department of Philosophy and Comparative Religion, Visva Bharati (Central University), Santiniketan, West Bengal, 731235, India

    Manjari Chakrabarty

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Chakrabarty, M. How Stone Tools Shaped Us: Post-Phenomenology and Material Engagement Theory. Philos. Technol. 32, 243–264 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-018-0310-x

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