H is for House

Home is where the hearth is. At least it was for thousands of years, when humans needed fire and shelter to stay alive. The tricky part is exactly how long ago this started, exactly or even in a rough estimate or even was it before they lost their fur and became hominids?

A house was pretty easy to define when I was six and learned “how” to draw them. Peaked roof, two windows in front, a door with a doorknob, and probably a chimney. I always drew a house with a chimney, after examples I’d seen, even though I didn’t have a fireplace until I was about twenty, and then we rarely used it, once I learned I had to clean it. But it turns out house=home=shelter is up for debate from the archaeologists, especially as they vie to see which came first. They did all seem to have fireplaces.

The last few days, my topics of ancient games, calendars, and fashion were on comparatively sophisticated inventions. Dates of 3000 BCE were modern compared with today’s topic. Housing is such a fundamental need that its origins go back much further other inventions, almost to the beginning of the human timeline. As usual, three angles of approach:

1. What does “house” mean?
2. When and where in the world was “housing” first created
3. What other aspects of humanity are revealed by knowing #1 and #2?

A Brief Foray into the Lower Paleolithic

If you’ve gotten to the bottom of the post, you may have seen my mini-timelines for each invention. I’ve been trying to put these inventions in context to each other. I’ve also been throwing around the terms Paleolithic and Homo sapiens pretty indiscriminately, this seems like a good place for a timeline refresher. I promise not to to get timeline-itis.

Remember that by the time hominids evolved to become Homo erectus (@1.5 mya) they’d lost the ability to eat raw food (smaller stomach, weaker teeth), in concert with bipedalism and creating stone tools. It was a good trade-off. This is why most anthropologists support the idea that fire was invented before we stood fully erect. Some time after that, hominids moved north, taking their special fire rocks. They settled all over Europe and Asia, and multiple Homo species branched off. Neanderthals and new Homo sapiens vied for territory. They found their own caves, their own tracts of hunting grounds. Neanderthals lost eventually, maybe because they didn’t have the bow and arrow. Most of all that evolution, despite taking a LONG TIME, took place to the left of the timeline. A lot of the more complex inventions emerged during the Middle or Upper Paleolithic. But Housing as a concept started in the Lower Paleolithic.

Marking Your Territory

Territory, Settler, Home: these are key ideas relate to House. Territory, which Neanderthals and Homo sapiens fought over, is one we know well. Many animals are territorial, as any one who has walked a male dog knows. Humans, like those leg-lifting dogs, like to have their own space, mark it, and aggressively defend others from taking it. Settler reminds us that humans thrive when they stay in one place. Sure, some are wanderers and nomads, but even nomads often follow the best hunting across the seasons, shuttling back and forth over the same grounds, just as those RV snowbirds who drive south from Michigan to Florida every winter. Add in Home, an emotional concept, but one we also understand. We like to settle into a single territory that we return to, from our daily hunting and gathering.

When archaeologists, therefore, think about the definition of a House, they aren’t thinking of the peaked roof, windows, and chimney. They mean the places where humans settled and marked as their territory, staying for a long time. Humans leave behind evidence, not just buried settlers and trash, but also ancient constructions. Such constructions could take any shape from a brick tower to rock overhangs to a long-used fire pit. Any or all of those could signal House.

Gimme Shelter

Armed with this somewhat loose definition of shelter, how far back could we go? Certainly to those earliest days of what the academics call “pyrotechnology,” the fire pits that are 1.5 to 1.9 million years old. Humans figured out how to use pyrite, a fire-starting rock, to make their own fires and how to dig protective pits that kept the fire in one place. They cooked the results of their hunts, which is why sites, for example in South Africa, contain stacks of burnt bones as evidence of humans. Other places in Spain, Georgia (the country not the state), Ethiopia, and places threaded around the Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Middle East, have fire pits and sheltered overhangs. Human territory.

Mary Leakey, the anthropologist responsible for a number of key discoveries at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, argued that the first human made shelter could have been a series of rocks she called a “stone circle.” The stones surround a slightly sunken spot, and she argued they were built up to form a windbreak. Others find the 1.8 million year old arrangement potentially a random assortment of rocks or just not “house” enough.

If a wind break or an overhang counts as territory/shelter/house, then humans have found plenty of places to settle near them. Last November, archaeologists reported finding that proverbial treasure trove from 150,000 ya, the stone tools and burnt objects that humans leave behind. It was in Tajikistan, in an area with a Nevada-like climate, desert-hot-cold-dry and bleak, though the shelter is near a small river patched with foliage. The water source would support a population and draw whatever could be hunted in the area, as long as the humans didn’t over hunt. This particular spot was near a Silk Road route used throughout the Early Middle Ages, so it might have been a part of migratory route across Asia. For the Homo sapiens who wandered, was this a permanent spot or more like a hotel?

When I saw the photo of Soli Havzak in Tajikstan, I knew where I’d seen such an unlikely site before. This is one of my favorite spots on earth: Canyon de Chelly in Arizona. The Anasazi indigenous people settled in multiple places in the southwestern U.S., 900-1300 CE, often in places where rock trickled through the water. The rock “purified” the water, and assuming that the streams were bigger then than now, it would explain why entire towns were built up in clefts like the one noted by the arrow. Ladders and footholds in the rock allowed the settlers access but also kept them protected against intruders, which is why after the Anasazi left, the Navajo moved in. At least until Kit Carson brought snipers and cruelty. Suffice it to say, though, that humans can find ingenious places to build houses.

Habitat for Humanity

Early people did not always just live near rocks or among stones, though. Two discoveries half a million years ago show ways that hominids started building, even before the branch of Homo sapiens. The first “disruptive discovery” in Zambia was as recent as 2019. Archaeologists found notched logs. This was “shocking” because wood doesn’t preserve very well, but the excavators think the timbers found near Kalambo Falls may have been preserved because of the presence of water. The team noticed right away that the wood had carved ends that could have been fitted together. They spent four years analyzing before announcing in 2023 the age of the materials; they must have had to check it three times because these 2x4s were 470,000 years old.

If this holds, this Zambia finding would “beat” the other known example of human-constructed houses. The Terra Amata find, from Nice, France, dated human hut building to 380,000 ya. The huts were along a beach, included centralized fire pits, human made walls of stone pebbles, and buckets full of stone tools. This discovery happened when the owner of some beachfront land was building a terrace in 1966. It was before the days of historical preservation, presumably, so the archaeologists were given six months only to dig. After they unearthed this major evidence of human habitation, they were told to put their stuff in a museum, and an apartment house was built on the site.

Home on Whatever Range

After the Terra Amata find, there are examples of housing styles littered across the world. Many depend on the length of time that humans had to inhabit. Shelters and huts have been discovered in digs around Australia, ranging from 40-65,000 ya, helping anthropologists understand how people crossed the seas to find new territory to settle.

Habitats have been found dating back 15-30,000 years from Mexico to Chile. After the wanderers figured out how to cross the Bering Strait or Pacific Ocean (we’ll debate this in letter “S”), they went south and threaded their way through the Andes. People created stone tools and shelters wherever they went. To the extent that they built huts of wood, palm leaves, or animal skins, we rarely know because those things don’t last.

It helped when they started building towers out of stone. The Turkey Gobekli Tepe site had an entire little village of brick towers @11,000 BCE, probably the oldest known “ruin,” if you will, of a city. If you’re going to settle in for long enough to build with stone, then you probably will be there for more than a season, hence the need for those carvings and calendars.

Wait only a few more thousand years, and humans would start building ziggurats, Stonehenge, pyramids, and all manner of skyscrapers. Or even yakchals. But we’ll save that one for tomorrow.