It is hard to factor the vicissitudes which have let paleo -anthropologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan such a relatively obscure scholar.

In the 1930s, he studied ethnology under Marcel Mauss, undertook widespread structuralist analysis of Paleolithic art, subsequently embarking on his decades-long study of technics, particularly in prehistory, and eventually rising to hold the Chair in Prehistory at the Collge de France from 1968 to 1982, almost exactly coterminous with Foucaults Chair in the History of S ystems of Thought. As Claude Levi-Strauss wrote upon Leroi-Gourhans death in 1986 Leroi-Gourhan had an avowedly catholic approach to scholarship, with his multidisciplinarity ranging across paleontology, physiology, ethnology, the history of art, technology, and biology. Claude LeviStrauss, a contemporary, whose more strict structuralist approach often led to the perception of their being at odds with one another, wrote of Leroi-Gourhan upon his death in 1986,
When one rereads his writings on physical anthropology, technology, prehistoric archaeology and art, one sees that the key idea that governed his thinking was always to study the interrelations between things rather than the things themselves , to try to reduce the chaotic diversity of the empirical data to invariant relations and to use . . . a method of transformations.

His earlier works were profoundly influential in French anthropology on the study of prehistoric technics; his innovation was to focus on the technical modes of action on matt er. Leroi-Gourhan put forward a tripartite dimensionality for understanding prehistoric technics: the external milieu of the environment actualized by that tool; the interior milieu of the intellectual capital of that hominid group; and, finally, the technical milieu, the socioeconomic and cultural factors inscribed into the tools themselves. It is the former site, the external milieu, where we can get a first sense of how technics couples with an environment to reconfigure the environment in which the human lives. It is the latter site, the technical milieu, which will later be identified as an inorganic repository of memory as it is characteristic of all tools to be a site of accumulation, of the sedimentation and exteriorization of knowledge and practi cesindeed, of memory itself. This technical exteriorization, as we shall see, will be put forward as a fundamental extra-biological dynamic in the very process of the evolution of the human. The first step toward technical exteriorization begins not wit h tools but with the feet. Leroi -Gourhans recognition of the importance of this first step was not a wholly innovative idea; he enthusiastically acknowledges his intellectual inheritance on this matter, quoting in near amazement the 4 th c. C.E. Cappadocian theologian St. Gregory of Nyssa:
So it was thanks to the manner in which our bodies are organized that our mind, like a musician, struck the note of language within us and we became capable of speech. This privilege would surely never have been ours if our lips had been required to perform the onerous and difficult task of procuring nourishment for our bodies. But our hands took over that task, releasing our mouths for the service of speech (25).

Leroi-Gourhan adds to this preternatural insight by stepping even further back in evolutionary time, to the feet as it were. Indeed, he went even further back, to what he calls an ongoing series of liberations: the freeing of the whole body from the liquid element in turn followed by the permanent elevat ion of the head from the ground, and finally reaching a point of concurrence with St. Gregory of Nyssa, the hand from the requirement of locomotion before adding the missing link: the brain from the facial mask (25). So what do these liberations then entail, beyond freedom from immersion in water, from pronation to the ground, of the hands from locomotion, and the brain from a cranial squeeze? For one, this process of exteriorizations is constantly subjected to a double-articulation of liberation and actualization. Given the focus in this paper on the return to the senses, we can restate these liberations as radical breaks in the modalities through which the world is experienced, from one sensoria to another. Consider, for example, the endurance of these atavistic sensoria on ideal-form models of our purported natural human condition. That is, even though the sensory experience of life in the water or firmly on the ground was wholly preexistent to the human, there is a persistence of the notio n of a shared sensorial ratio and mode of perceptionas if the body were naturally in an unmediated state, purely immanent to its environment. In other words, a stubborn insistence that our human experience fully and exclusivelyat least in a natural sensetranspires through a biological vector of exteriorization. Leroi -Gourhans model runs counter to such naturalistic accounts.

Standing in contrast, then, is an account which begins with the feet. Leroi -Gourhan inventively presents bipedalism as marking the end of the pre-human sensorial calibration in which exteriorization is enacted strictly via the body itself, as a biological process. This because biological exclusivity is precluded by the emergent role of technics wherein the proto-human vector of exteriorization becomes as much technical as it is biological. A question in need of clarification arises here: exteriorization as who, or, rather, exteriorization through what? To answer that requires a return to Leroi -Gourhans aforementioned epigram: it all begins with the feet. To make sense of the importance of the bipedal turn, the feet must be situated on a strictly defined path which leads to the exteriorization of the human via technics: first through mobility, then through its manifestations of liberation, and finally via exteriorization. Darwin began with cognition, hence his cerebral model of evolution; Leroi-Gourhan begins with locomotion. To say it all begins with the feet indicates a cascade of incidental by -products of bipedalism. Some four million years ago there appeared the first definitely bipedal hominid, Australopithecus anamensis. Standing on two feet freed the hands for grasping and eventually manipulating objects in the environment. Thus it is the liberation of the hands wh ich radically expands the sensorial possibilities of the anterior field of the human:
[A] facial pole governed by the actions of the head and a manual pole governed by the actions of the forelimb. The two poles act in close relationship to perform the most elaborate technical operations (31).

Technical operations, elaborate or otherwise, were made manifest some two million years ago, with fossil evidence of the oldest lithic industry. These simple Oldowan stone tools (rocks with a few pieces struck away to form a sharp edge), constructed by Homo habilis, are the first examples of technics in the archeological record. Curiously, until the appearance of the much more sophisticated Acheulean handaxe lithic industry remained entirely unchanged across the archeological record for about one million years. Furthermore, the fossil record of that era shows that the braincase of our hominid ancestors was much smaller, about half the size of modern humans (Cavalli -Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza 61). This takes us to what Stiegler, following Derrida, will identify as an aporetic centre in Leroi -Gourhans model of the originary condition of the human. What this suggests is that the brain, the cognitive wellspring of interiorityso important to ancient Greek notions of the transcendental nature of knowledgewas neither a priori to technics nor a coterminous driving force. Instead, it was absent, at least in its larger and more advanced form. Tools did not appear because bigger-brained hominids were looking for something new to do; rather, it all began with the feet. Cranial expansion is just one of many recursive by-products of an upright posture (and we will consider the expansion of the brain, or corticalization shortly when we discuss Stiegler). Walking upright requires a vertical vertebrae which, in turn, is able to physically support a larger skull. It also requires morphological adjustments of the skull for balance, namely the base of the skull shortens as the capacity of the brain pan expands. Thus it is bipedalism which acts serendipitously to support the potential of the enlargement of the brain as it structurally increases the capacity of the brain pan into which a larger brain can evolve. But it is technics, as provocatively suggested by Leroi-Gourhan, which recursively facilitates the actual enlargement of the brain. In other words, Leroi-Gourhan situates tools and the brain in a deeply complex and recursive relation, wherein, both impact the other but only ever in the milieus of mobility, liberation, and exteriorization. Questions remain. Darwins cerebral model would suggest lithic industry appeared because of the most sagacious among our hominid ancestors. Leroi-Gourhan sees it differently. Somehow, somewhere an Australanthropian picked up sharp edged stones and used them as an extension of the hand, as if their brains and bodies had gradually exuded them (106). Technics, therefore, emerges first as a zoological and not a cultural phenomenon; at this point the process of liberation was in nascent process, as was the relationship between technics and the body. For the period in the archeological record in which technics seemingly remained only a zoological feature, Leroi-Gourhan explicitly compares the lithic industry of the prot o-human Australanthropians to the way an animal has claws (97). That is, technics stood solely as induced by the bipedal skeletal system as if biologically exuded, bereft of any imprint of what might be considered human thought. A very different

model of the pre-human thus emerges, one already infused with technics, albeit a technics that is a zoological feature. This serves up the evocative image of a veritable array of prehistoric cyborgs walking across now-extinct lineages. We, the inheritors? Tec hnics as an originary condition of the human? One important by-product of this sometimes seemingly contradictory paradigm is that it caught the sustained attentions of first Jacques Derrida and later Bernard Stiegler.