Comment on de Beaune 'The invention of technology'

Abstract

Evolution took an ancestor we shared with other African apes and transformed it into modern humans and those apes. Some of the changes affected the skeletal anatomy and presumable soft tissue as well. Other changes were certainly in the domain of behaviour, and archaeologists attempt to construct a narrative about those changes from an archaeological record dominated by the presence of stone tools. There are many more sites with stone tools than sites with fossil skeletal remains, so if we get our interpretations right archaeologists may be able to construct a fuller picture of that record than any other scientists of hominin and human evolution. It is a grand challenge, but it is not a straightforward one.