Bareness

When human thought is placed in an evolutionary perspective, two of the most important and characteristic phenomena are language and tools. It can be assumed that these two are closely related: linguistic communication enables a more articulated, structured, and memorizable tool use, and a rich toolset, in turn, trains the brain and provides a basis for more intense communication and language use (see P. Reynolds 1994, The Complementary theory of language and tool use: 422).

A tool truly becomes a tool when tools are placed in a fundamentally endless chain, that is, when they become endlessly iterable: a tool to make another tool, which in turn makes another tool, and so on. The tool sequences of animals and early hominids are very short. Moreover, they are only of one type, namely “pods” and “poly-pods” (see Reynolds 1994: 420).

Poly-pods are objects that stay together only when positioned in a certain way in a gravitational field, for example, stones or boxes stacked on top of each other. In contrast, “liths” and “polyliths” (from the Greek “lithos,” meaning “stone”) can freely rotate in all spatial directions, for example, a hammerstone or a stone ax attached to the end of a shaft. Poly-pods are held together by gravity, while polyliths are held together by the connections between the liths.