A cobble of quartzite. Six flakes struck from one face, alternating, to produce an edge about seventy millimetres long. Two and a half million years old. It took under a minute to make and it is the oldest deliberate object we have.

The hand that made it was not our hand. The wrist was different, the thumb was shorter, the precision grip was partial. Over the following two million years the hand changed — the thumb lengthened, the tuft of the fingertip broadened, the wrist stabilised — and it changed in response to the objects it was making, which were in turn made by the hand that the previous objects had produced.

There is no frame in that film where you can point and say: here is the hand, and here, separately, is the first tool it picked up. They came up together, each one the other’s cause, for a hundred thousand generations.

So there is no last gesture of the hand that made the tool. The plate is misnamed. There is no moment before the augmentation, because the augmentation is what grew the hand, and the hand is what we mean by the word.

Everything since — the wheel, the lens, the ledger, the loom, the transistor, the model with seventy billion parameters — is the same event, still running, at a different clock speed. You have never met an unaugmented person. Nobody has. The category is empty and has always been empty and the emptiness is the finding.