Steak tournedos or beef Wellington: an attempt to understand the meaning of Stone Age transformative techniques

Research into human uniqueness is gaining increasing importance in prehistoric archaeology. The most striking behaviour unique to early and modern humans among other primates is perhaps that they used fire to transform the properties of materials. In Archaeology, these processes are sometimes termed "engineering" or "transformative techniques" because they aim at producing materials with altered properties. Were such transformative techniques cognitively more demanding than other tool making processes? Were they the key factors that separated early humans, such as Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens, from other hominins? Many approaches to investigating these techniques rely on their complexity. The rationale behind this is that some techniques required more steps than others, thus revealing the underlying mechanisms of human uniqueness (e.g., unique human culture). However, it has been argued that the interpretation of process complexity may be prone to arbitrariness (i.e., different researchers have different notions of what is complex). Here I propose an alternative framework for interpreting transformative techniques. Three hypotheses are derived from an analogy with well-understood processes in modern-day cuisine. The hypotheses are about i) the requirement in time and/or raw materials of transformative techniques, ii) the difficulty to succeed in conducting transformative techniques and iii) the necessity to purposefully invent transformative techniques, as opposed to discovering them randomly. All three hypotheses make testable predictions.

Patrick Schmidt