Читать книгу The Prehistory of Home - Jerry D. Moore - Страница 9

CHAPTER 2

Starter Homes

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home!

—John Howard Payne, Home, Sweet Home

With its thin melody that sounds saccharine to the modern ear, it is worth remembering that “Home, Sweet Home” is one of the most popular songs in all of American history. The song was born on the London stage in 1823, in a popular opera “Clari, or the Maid of Milan,” written by John Howard Payne with music by Sir Henry Bishop (the first composer to be knighted, allegedly because Queen Victoria loved “Home, Sweet Home” so much).¹ A native of New York, Payne had gone to London as an actor and gained modest standing as a playwright and librettist. His fortunes oscillated between outstanding success and crushing debts. Payne wrote the lyrics to “Home, Sweet Home” in a dull autumn in Paris, when “the depressing influences of the sky and air were in harmony with the feelings of solitude and sadness which oppressed his soul.”²

The opera was a modest success, but the song was a phenomenon. In the year of its debut, some one hundred thousand copies of sheet music for “Home, Sweet Home” sold, and it was tremendously popular throughout the nineteenth century, especially in the United States and particularly during the American Civil War.

“Home, Sweet Home” was one of Abraham Lincoln’s favorite songs, and it was cherished by both Union and Confederate soldiers. The images of home tugged at the hearts of even war-hardened troops, including those engaged in the December 1862 Battle of Stones River, a bloody clash in the vicinity of Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

The 44,000 Federalist soldiers of the Army of the Cumberland faced the 34,000 men in the Confederate Army of Tennessee. In miserable weather on the cold night of December 30, 1862, the two armies were within earshot of each other, stretched along the battlefront of stony outcrops and cedar brakes. As the short winter day ended, military bands on both sides began to play. A soldier in the First Tennessee Infantry later remembered that “the still winter night carried their strains to great distance. At every pause on our side, far away could be heard the military bands of the other.”

One of the bands began “Home, Sweet Home,” and as the well- known chorus echoed in the night air, Federal and Confederate bands on both sides of the battle line united in the refrain “one after another until all the bands of each army were playing ‘Home Sweet Home.’ And after our bands had ceased playing, we could hear the sweet refrain as it died away on the cool frosty air.”³

Over the next three days, the two armies suffered more than 23,515 casualties, with over 3,000 dead, one of the bloodiest engagements in the western campaigns of the Civil War.

John Howard Payne died further from home than any of the fallen at the Battle of Stones River. Approaching his fifties and after decades of travail to little effect—first as a composer and then as a low-level diplomat—Payne lobbied for the sinecure of a consulship. In and out of office with changing presidential administrations, in 1851 Payne was reappointed consul of Tunis and set sail that spring. Less than a year later, he died and was laid to rest in the Protestant cemetery of St. George in Tunis.

But because of the popularity of “Home, Sweet Home,” Payne was not forgotten. The U.S. government placed a marble marker on his Tunisian grave, and twenty years later a bronze bust was erected in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York, in a ceremony attended by thirty thousand onlookers.⁴ Ten years later, a group of Payne’s friends and former backers organized the return of the author’s remains from distant lands. In March 1883 Payne’s time-blackened bones arrived in New York, thirty years after his death. His remains were carried on a special train to Washington, D.C., where an elaborate funeral celebration, attended by President Chester Arthur and other dignitaries, was held in Oak Hill Cemetery on the occasion of what would have been Payne’s ninety-fifth birthday.⁵

Finally, John Howard Payne was home.

. . .

Exile and longing, wandering and return—for humans there is no place like home. These complex attachments originated among our distant hominid ancestors, millions of years in the past. “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests,” Jesus observed before contrasting animal domesticity with his own wanderings. Astoundingly varied constructions are built by animals, and it is tempting to trace a connecting line from nests and dens to condos and tipis.

For all animals, including humans, constructions extend the bodily limits of existence. As the Nobel Laureate Karl von Frisch observed, “The most usual purpose of building activities in animals is to make a home that will give protection,”⁶ but animal constructions also serve as traps, pantries, stages for mating and display, climate control systems, nurseries, roadways, and so on. Animal constructions protect offspring, regulate moisture and humidity, ventilate gasses, communicate information, and camouflage occupants.⁷

Such constructions are sometimes considered examples of what Richard Dawkins has called “the extended phenotype,” the external manifestations of natural selection at the genetic level that extend beyond the organism. In Dawkins’s view, the creation of nests and dens, burrows and webs is driven by the essential genetic objectives: survival and reproduction.⁸

Such fundamental evolutionary drives have produced some astounding constructions. Termites can build towering nests 20 feet tall and excavate wells 150 feet deep, yet the animals are only one-tenth of an inch long; at a human scale these would be constructions 2½ miles tall and excavations 20 miles deep. Termite nests house several million inhabitants and are built by small individual insects laboring in the dark.⁹

Similarly, it is worth recalling that the largest construction on earth that is visible from outer space is not the Great Wall of China, as usually claimed (see chapter 7), but Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, a 1,600-milelong structure made by organisms no longer than your fingernail.

Despite such awe-inspiring features of the natural world, not all animals build. As the biologist Mike Hansell has written, “The occurrence of building behaviors is neither confined to a narrow range of taxa nor scattered evenly through the animal kingdom. Instead, it has a few outbursts of virtuosity with talented displays of skill occurring sporadically across the animal spectrum.”¹⁰

The most stunning architects in the nonhuman world are spiders, mites, insects, and birds. Our closest animal relations—chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas—are uninspired builders. Nest-building by chimpanzees and bonobos is a fairly impromptu construction process.¹¹ Both species settle nightly in trees, building nests of branches, sometimes with rough thatchings of leaves. As night falls, the apes groom each other, rest, and mate in their arboreal love-nests—behaviors in common with many modern humans. Unlike most of us, however, chimps do not eat in bed.

In field studies of chimpanzee and bonobo nesting behavior, one of the few patterns common to all the study-groups is that they avoid nesting in trees with ripe fruit. The height of nests varies based on environment: constructed 15–80 feet above the ground, nests tended to be higher in wetter environments or during the rainy season. Nests tend to be regularly spaced, but this may differ based on the threat of predators. Most nests are only occupied once, although in some study groups as many as one-third of the nests were reoccupied, but only when the a particular food source attracted the nomadic troop to linger in a particular locale.

Regardless of these variations, all chimpanzees build nests each night. The primatologist W.C. McGrew writes, “There is nothing more predictable in chimpanzee daily life than this universal behavioral sequence and its artifactual outcome. It is the cornerstone of chimpanzee nature.”¹²

Since they are imposing animals, gorillas worry less about predators—except for human poachers—and their homes reflect this nonchalance.¹³ Given their large bulk, gorillas tend to nest on the ground, although occasionally they nest in trees. The primatologist Dian Fossey described their nests as “sturdy, compact structures, sometimes resembling oval, leafy bathtubs.”¹⁴ The mountain gorilla, as the biologist George Schaller documented, “stands or sits, and pulls, breaks, or bends in vegetation which it places around and under its body.” Regardless of their basic construction technique, “the precise method employed varies with the particular circumstance—whether the nest is in a tree or on the ground, whether it is on a steep slope or a flat area.”¹⁵ Similar to the chimpanzees, gorillas apparently reoccupy nests only when abundant fruits or other foods tempt them to stay in an area.¹⁶

In less than five minutes, a gorilla can make a treetop nest, bending down the branches in a tree’s crown or weaving limbs into a platform bed. Ground-level nests take even less time, built from a few handfuls of foliage roughly arranged in less than thirty seconds.¹⁷

But what are the functions of the nests built by chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas?

There are several possible answers.¹⁸ Arboreal nests may protect sleeping primates from predators, although various monkeys sleep in trees without building nests. Sleeping in treetops may protect primates from mosquitoes and other biting insects that transmit diseases. One of the strongest explanations links nest building and body heat, the “thermoregulation hypothesis,” because the differences appear linked to local environment and weather. Unlike other animals—whose constructions are uniform, presumably because those behaviors are genetically hardwired—higher apes appear to have a basic drive to nest, but vary their constructions based on local circumstances. As the authors of one study of gorillas living in the Congo put it, the variations in nests “appear to be in response to wet and cool conditions, clearly suggesting that the gorillas call on innate nest-building tendencies with a quite flexible, adaptive specificity.”¹⁹

These findings suggest that the nests built by African apes differ from other examples of animal architecture in one fundamental regard: the constructions vary in response to local conditions. While we recognize that modern apes are not our hominid ancestors, it is interesting to realize that, like these primate relatives, all humans make shelters but do so in different ways. It may be that this common adaptive propensity is the essential connection. Despite the variations and differences between ape nests and human dwellings, there exists this broad connection, leading one primatologist to ask, “Was there no place like home?”²⁰

. . .

As of this writing, the oldest home I have excavated is merely 6,000 years old. In June and July of 2006, I directed excavations in far northern Peru at a small prehistoric site called El Porvenir. I had first seen the site in 1996 during an archaeological reconnaissance near the border between Peru and Ecuador; it had taken ten years to raise the funds to return and excavate the site (not an uncommon occurrence in archaeology).

El Porvenir caught my attention and drew me back a decade later because I thought it would contain evidence of ancient homes. The site consisted of a group of six earthen mounds around an open space, which I assumed was a cluster of house mounds around a central plaza. El Porvenir covered an area a bit larger than a football field, 120 × 90 meters. The mounds were simple ovals, 10 to 30 meters at their bases, and the tallest mound was only 1.6 meters tall. The mounds were noticeable, but not impressive. What these surface details suggested was this: these were not monumental constructions or carefully built public architecture, but rather simple mounds probably containing archaeological evidence of ancient dwellings and households. And that is why I excavated El Porvenir.

On the surface of the site, we found a few stray burnished brick-red potsherds decorated with lines and dots of a creamy white. Based on what we knew in 2006, we thought this pottery style dated sometime between 500 B.C. and A.D. 500 (the vagueness of the date simply reflecting how little we understood of the region’s prehistory). Since the El Porvenir mounds were relatively small (these were not massive accumulations like Near Eastern tells) I expected that even the oldest layers of El Porvenir would date sometime within the 500 B.C. to A.D. 500 range or perhaps a few centuries older—but not by much.

I was very wrong.

We began excavating the mounds of El Porvenir. We laid out 2 × 2 meter test pits arranged in a row to transect the mound, their edges lined by taut staked strings. We scraped through the hard dun clay, and within inches of the surface encountered the first traces of ancient dwellings.

There was not much to see. A few irregular lumps of adobe bricks, fire-reddened and ashy—the remains of a cooking hearth. A harder surface was a floor compacted by footsteps. A right-angled line of postholes penetrated the floor, small divots darkened by the rotted wooden poles that once supported the walls. A cluster of sun-dried clay chunks bore grooved imprints of river canes. From such prosaic traces, we discovered a portion of a roughly rectangular structure built from wattle and daub, and the cooking hearth indicated that we had uncovered an ancient home.

Below this floor was a jumbled stratum of fill, a craze of rubble and shells. The shells were principally of oysters and other mollusks that lived in mangrove swamps now located 6–10 kilometers west of El Porvenir. The clutter of shells, cocked at every angle, was a garbage dump, or midden, rather than the floor of a prehistoric home.

Under the midden layer were the fragments of another earlier house. Later occupants of El Porvenir had dug into and destroyed the lower levels, yet enough remained of the earlier structure to partially reconstruct it. In one corner there was a basin-shaped hearth molded from mud and holding grey ash and charcoal flecks. We found sections of compact floor made from intentionally poured layers of grayish river mud; the grey mud floor was ripped away in places by later trenching, but clearly defined an earlier dwelling. More post-molds were visible in the preserved patches of flooring, arching in a broad curve that indicated an elliptical structure. There were no traces of mud daub, indicating that this earlier house differed in plan and construction from the rectangular wattle and daub house perched above it.

We troweled into even earlier layers. As each stratum was uncovered, all the features were mapped and photographed. The soil was screened to recover the smallest fragments of the past.

We dug through another thick stratum of oyster, removing over 500 kilograms of bone-grey shells. In the same layers we found hundreds of fragile fish bones from catfish, mullet, tuna, sea bass, and other delectable fish. Some species had been netted and hooked in the quiet mangrove estuaries, others taken from boats on the open sea. Small pottery shards and stone flakes sprinkled the shell midden as we dug down in the mound.

And finally we came upon the very oldest house at El Porvenir.

The traces of the house were simply a curved wall marked by small post-molds. The posts had been set in pairs, presumably on both sides of an elliptical wall. Additional posts were set in the middle of the floor, apparently supporting narrow roof-beams that intersected like the spokes of a wheel. We estimated that the structure would have been about five meters in diameter. The floor consisted of a compact layer of dense midden.

When we excavated this floor we thought it was old, but only six months later—after we were able to export samples for radiocarbon dating and obtained the laboratory results—did we know just how old. The samples from the oyster shell layer dated to 4700–4340 B.C. and the floor was older than that—the house was more than 6,000 years old. The prehistoric house at El Porvenir is one of the oldest houses known from northern South America.

The dwellings at El Porvenir exemplify the archaeological evidence of home. First, the evidence we found in our excavations bore the imprints of human intention. The post-molds were evenly spaced and aligned, well-made pits; they were neither root bores nor animal burrows. In the upper layers the floors were made from thick caps of grey river clays and the lower floors were compacted midden; both were human made. These were cultural features, not natural products, and they reflected a plan. They were, to recall Tim Ingold’s observation, a human project.

Second, people carried things to these dwellings, a point so obvious that it is easily overlooked. People transported shellfish and fish, pottery and stone tools to these places—moving these materials kilometers, bringing these things home.

Finally, each of the dwellings contained the traces of a suite of human activities—cooking meals and making tools, in addition to building huts—all pointing to simple domesticities six millennia ago.

And while there is a great deal about the early villagers of El Porvenir that remains unknown, we do know this: like humans elsewhere in the past, they built homes.

. . .

So why is there home? Why did the human home evolve?

One prominent hypothesis argues that the human home originates from two biological imperatives: reproductive success and the extended dependency of human offspring.²¹

Obviously, all species either reproduce or become extinct, but not all species demand the high levels of parental investment in offspring as humans do. The California mussel gives birth to 60,000–70,000 spawn in the crashing waters of the Pacific coast without giving her offspring another thought.

In contrast, human infants cannot walk until nine to twelve months after birth and they do not have all their teeth until sometime after two years old, leading one wag to suggest that instead of a mere nine months of pregnancy, humans have a 32-month gestation period: 9 in utero plus 24 ex utero.

Further, since humans rarely bear more than a single offspring at a time, both parents’ genetic heredity is dependent on one child’s survival to reproductive age (although the more offspring the better the odds). Thus, the argument goes, both parents have a vested genetic interest in the survival of their young.

But the mother’s and father’s investments differ. In traditional societies, mothers typically breastfeed their infants for two to three years or more.²² While the mother-child interactions are sustained and intimate, how does the father contribute? He brings home food, particularly meat. Similarly, male hominids ensured the survival of their offspring by provisioning their families, wandering out to forage (and becoming increasingly bipedal in the process), and returning with food. Rather than risk their parental investment, it is to the reproductive advantage of both parents to have their offspring in a relatively safe location to which resources are transported.

Such are the evolutionary advantages of home.

When this eminently plausible “home-base hypothesis” was first articulated, it seemed to account for a broad range of anthropological facts that relatively quickly became matters of dispute.²³ For example, the hypothesis explained the idea of “Man the Hunter” in which males venture out in quest of game, returning with highly prized meat.

But when more detailed ethnographic research was conducted, a different picture emerged. Women in foraging societies often contributed more calories to the diet than men did. Men were not the only hunters, but women, children, and the elderly also hunted small game, fished, or collected shellfish. More surprisingly, detailed studies of meat-sharing indicated that relatively little of a hunter’s catch actually went to his own offspring because of strong social requirements to share meat with other kin or band members.

Finally, critics argued, the classic ethnographies of hunter-and-gatherer societies overlooked the transformations that many of these societies had endured due to contacts with other agrarian or industrial societies and empires. Driven into marginal environments, decimated by introduced diseases, or ensnared through commercial and/or political ties, these ethnographic cases were not frozen representatives of a Lower Paleolithic past.

Ultimately, resolving the questions of the earliest hominid social group was stymied by a simple but daunting fact: it is extremely difficult to find archaeological sites more than one million years old.

First, to find one-million-year-old sites, you have to search one-million-year-old landforms, which are often deeply buried deposits. For example, the Great Rift Valley system of eastern Africa has proven so rich in hominid and other fossils precisely because ancient and deeply buried strata are laid bare in its eroded exposures.

Second, if the artifacts and features created by chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas are a guide, the sites created by hominids probably were ephemeral and incompletely preserved. It is unlikely that one-million year-old termite-hunting twigs or improvised leafy nests will ever be discovered by archaeologists.

Finally, even if durable artifacts are found on ancient land surfaces, there is a good chance that such materials will have been moved about by erosion or other natural processes and the archaeological materials are no longer in their original in situ associations.

These challenges only made the sites excavated by Mary Leakey all the more exciting. In meticulous excavations conducted throughout the 1960s, Mary Leakey and her colleagues focused on a number of sites located in the oldest sediments in the main gorge at Olduvai, sediments deposited by a now-dry lake between 1.87 and 1.71 million years old. Leakey excavated in two main areas exposed by streams that cut down through Olduvai’s strata over the last 200,000 years, the DK Locality and the FLK Complex.²⁴

The sites contained a variety of animal bones and stone artifacts: crude choppers, hammer stones, and stone flakes with utilized edges. The faunal remains were surprisingly diverse, including big game (such as ancient relatives of giraffes, elephants, rhinos, zebras, and wildebeests) as well as two species of turtles and one species of tortoise. Twenty-three different taxa of mammals were found, including a large number of crocodile teeth.

In one portion of the DK Locality, Leakey’s team discovered an amazing feature: a circular array of stones. Leakey wrote, “At DK there is a stone circle which is the earliest man-made structure known. It is built of loosely pile blocks of lava and measures three and a half to four metres in diameter. It bears a striking similarity to crude stone circles constructed for temporary shelter by present-day nomadic peoples such as the Turkana in Kenya.”²⁵

Confessing to her own suspicions, Leaky admitted, “The Olduvai structure was a most surprising discovery in view of its age and for a while I was reluctant to believe that the blocks of lava had been artificially arranged into a circle. However, the geologists and prehistorians who have since seen the circle are almost unanimous in considering that it is likely to be the work of the early hominids and not a natural feature.”

Mary Leakey had found the oldest known house on earth.

Other archaeological projects expanded on the Olduvai discoveries, particularly at the FXJj 50 site in northern Kenya, where excavations in the 1970s and early 1980s were directed by Richard Leakey and Glynn Isaac.²⁶ At FXJj 50 a litter of chipped stone tools and animal bones (representing mammals, birds, and fish) suggested the existence of a home base about 1.6–1.5 million years ago. Further, it was possible to fit together the chipped stone flakes and cores at the site—like pieces of a lithic jigsaw puzzle—indicating that the artifacts at FXJj 50 were largely in their original places, undisturbed by time.

Thus, the archaeological evidence indicated that by 1.5 million years ago our very ancient ancestors had developed home bases where they made tools, butchered game, shared food, and even (possibly) built simple shelters.

Or did they?

Various scholars pointed out flaws in the data from the DK Locality.²⁷ For example, nearly half the identifiable animal bones came from crocodiles—an unlikely game animal for a small hominid armed with crude stone tools. Eighty-six percent of the crocodile bones were teeth, which crocodiles lose naturally. Other animal bones incised with cut marks from stone tools also showed evidence of being gnawed by hyenas or other carnivores. While stone flake tools and choppers showed evidence of hominid intent, it was far from certain that hominids had actually hunted game: they could have used stone tools to scavenge and scrape meat from dead game killed by other, more effective, nonhuman predators.

FIGURE 2. Site DK I, Olduvai Gorge. Redrawn from Leakey 1979.

And finally, the circular stone feature that Mary Leakey reluctantly concluded was an ancient shelter in fact consisted of chunks of the underlying bedrock jutting into the layers containing bone and stone tools. The circular pattern of bedrock blocks probably resulted from a combination of weathering and stones moved by tree roots. These were not shelter walls built by the ancient occupants of Olduvai Gorge. Mary Leakey had not found the oldest house on earth.

The archaeology of African sites dating between 2.6 and 1.6 million years ago provides a fragmentary and partial vista into the behavior of early hominids.²⁸ While these ancestors made simple stone tools, ate meat, and carried raw materials and some food to sites, other behaviors remain unclear or in dispute. Some studies suggest that while certain Lower Stone Age sites in Africa might contain evidence for tool use and food preparation, the sites are not significantly different from the archaeological patterns potentially left by chimpanzees. Other paleoanthropologists see the same sites as evidence for hominid activity. There are relatively few of these older sites, and the archaeological evidence is frustratingly ambiguous.

It is like trying to see complex constellations on a cloudy night from the flickering light of a handful of stars. Based on such uncertain illuminations, it seems that these ancient sites were not yet homes.

. . .

The basic problem is this: there are no Paleolithic Pompeiis.²⁹ A fundamental question that archaeologists always ask is “Are the constituents of a site really associated? Are the objects in situ and located in their original positions or rather are they out of context?” Ideally, every site would be like the ash-covered remains of ancient Pompeii: a moment frozen in time in the autumn of A.D. 79. In fact, only rarely are archaeological sites sealed deposits, intact and stilled.

A wide array of natural processes can modify or disturb an archaeological site. Bacteria and scavenging animals consume organic materials, leaving behind only indigestible stone, pottery, and bone. Flowing water—varying in volume from raindrops to flash floods—can move artifacts, cut through strata, or erode objects. Badgers, gophers, lizards, worms, and other burrowing animals change the soil matrix and move archaeological materials. As clay soils expand when wet and shrink when dry, archaeological objects are moved through the profile along with rocks and gravels.

While all archaeological sites are affected by these vagaries of preservation, the problem is most pronounced for sites from the dawn of humanity. Obviously, the oldest sites have the greatest opportunities for disturbance and decay. Further, such early sites usually have a relatively light material footprint. The sites are rarely the result of a permanent occupation because humans were highly mobile and nomadic; the archaeological record is correspondingly slight. And it may be ambiguous whether the objects and features in these early sites are the result of human actions. For example, charred wood may be from an ancient campfire or a lighting-struck tree. Cut marks on apparently butchered bones may prove to be tooth marks from nonhuman predators.

Consider the controversial site of Terra Amata, located in Nice on the French Riviera. The site was excavated over six months in 1966 after construction crews trenched into the archaeological deposit. Construction was suspended and a salvage excavation was begun, directed by Henry de Lumley.³⁰

Terra Amata may have evidence of one of the earliest human dwellings, 350,000–450,000 years old. De Lumley and his team uncovered thousands of stone tools and flakes, an array of bones from fauna large and small, levels that contained a few postholes, small hearths, and blocks of stone and oval clusters of archaeological materials that de Lumley interpreted as the remains of ancient huts 7–15 × 4–6 meters in size. Further, de Lumley interpreted the archaeological strata as forming thin, discrete layers that represented annual reoccupations of Terra Amata by mobile hunters and gatherers camped during successive springtimes on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea. De Lumley identified eleven of these layers and interpreted them as separate “living floors.”

But de Lumley’s interpretation was challenged by the analysis of the stone tools and flakes, research conducted by Paola Villa, then a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley. One aspect of Villa’s project involved conjoining stone tools and flakes, literally fitting back together the stone pieces that fly off as a core is struck with a hammer stone. Through careful analysis, Villa reconstructed the way tools were made, and in the process she made an awkward discovery.

Some conjoinable flakes came from Terra Amata’s different living floors. The discrete layers de Lumley had proposed were cross-cut by stone fragments from the same original core.

This led some scholars to dismiss Terra Amata as the fanciful reconstruction of archaeological imagination, an impression made somewhat worse by incomplete reporting on the excavation.³¹ Other archaeologists simply erased Terra Amata from the list of ancient European sites.

That seems too dismissive. Although the evidence for vertical movements of flakes undermines the idea that Terra Amata contained eleven seasonal encampments, it does not mean that Terra Amata is archaeologically irrelevant. For example, even the cautious and critical Villa concluded that Terra Amata “is a site with material diffused through deposits 1.5–2.0 meters thick. Features such as hearths, post-holes, and alignments of [limestone] blocks were preserved, but site formation processes have resulted in partial mixing of the residues of probably separate occupation episodes.”³²

So here is what we may infer: Terra Amata was a home base dating to between 450,000 and 350,000 years ago, a place that members of the genus Homo (but not Homo sapiens) modified by building fires and simple structures—probably windbreaks—and where they made stone tools and prepared food. In this narrow and spartan sense, Terra Amata was a home.

Other sites present similarly ambiguous evidence of home. For example, at the site of Bilzingsleben, in eastern Germany, excavations uncovered a small lakeside site that may contain evidence of three elliptical shelters dating to 418,000–280,000 years ago.³³ Travertine blocks and large animal bones were placed to anchor windbreaks. Small features of burned earth and charcoal are associated with each dwelling, as are activity areas consisting of elephant bones and anvils formed from blocks of travertine. Stone tools from Bilzingsleben are clearly artifacts: pebble tools, hammer-stones, knives, scrapers, points, and other flake tools. Fauna remains include rhino, beaver, red deer, elephant, and bear; none of the bones show gnaw marks, yet some of the elephant foot bones have geometric cut marks incised with a stone tool. An intriguing circular pavement of stones pressed into the softer underlying sediments was partially excavated on the edge of the site; measuring nine meters in diameter, it is clearly an archaeological feature.³⁴

Given this archaeological assemblage, one would think that Bilzings- leben would handily pass every conceivable objection to its authenticity. And yet one archaeologist has argued that Bilzingsleben was a place where hominids met but did not dwell, and that the circular “shelters” are mere natural features around which hominids camped, ate, and made tools—but did not build.

Even the patient reader may wonder, “Is there nothing about archaeology that is certain? What type of intellectual discipline (if that is even the right word!) can be whipsawed by alternative explanations?”

And that, itself, requires a confession and an explanation.

. . .

Archaeology is not, by and large, an experimental science. With few exceptions, it is impossible to replicate the conditions and observations that led to an inference or discovery. It is usually impossible to recreate conditions or recombine elements to reproduce results—the way a high school chemistry teacher can use electrolysis to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen every single semester, year after year.

Archaeological excavations are particularly irrevocable. Once an artifact has been removed from the soil, it cannot be re-excavated. Which is why archaeologists spend so much time laying out grids, measuring the depths of strata, recording, photographing, drawing and so on—all the painstaking efforts to document an irreproducible set of scientific data. You cannot “un-excavate” a site.

This, of course, also allows for doubts. Were the patterns in the excavated data really there, or are they the figments of hyperactive archaeological interpretation? If the patterns are real, are they the product of natural processes, cultural manipulations, or some combination of different factors? Are the objects really associated, is the site accurately dated, was the excavation competent? And on, and on, and on.

At times, archaeologists appear to be an apostleship of Doubting Thomases.

Take what, at first glance, would seem to be a fairly uncomplicated event: building a campfire. If bipedalism separates hominids from our ape cousins, then the use of fire separates humans from all other animals. As Richard Wrangham has argued, fire and the ability to cook food is the transcendent technological breakthrough in human history.³⁵

Anthropogenic fire should be relatively easy to discover in the archaeological record. Fires leave behind charcoal and ash, burn soils brick-red, and reorder the magnetic fields of clays. All these are regularly found by archaeologists. Natural fires are caused by lightening strikes, sparks from falling rocks, volcanic eruptions, and spontaneous combustion of rotting organic materials. In principle we would expect naturally occurring fires to be widespread and unconstrained and human campfires to be relatively small and contained (although obviously humans regularly cause enormous, uncontrollable “wild” fires).³⁶

So it a shock to learn of the uncertainties of the evidence for early human fire. A broad and hypercritical review dismissed most claims of hominid fire use before 200,000–100,000 years ago.³⁷ For example, in China the famous site of Zhou-k’ou-tien—where “Peking Man,” an Asian example of Homo erectus, was found in the 1930s—was long thought to contain traces of campfires kindled by hominids 500,000–200,000 years ago. More recent analyses suggest that the yellowish-red lenses interpreted as hearths are actually reddish brown sediments that collected in small, still pools of drip water, leaving traces that looked like hearths but were not.³⁸

And yet, three sites—two in Africa, the other in Israel—indicate much earlier hominid use of fire. In Kenya, at the 1.5-million-year-oldsite of FXJj 20 East at Koobi Fora, excavations exposed four small features, 30–40 cm in diameter and 10–15 cm thick, on the same flat layer of pale yellowish brown silt.³⁹ Three of the patches were slightly reddened earth, and the fourth was a dark-grey hue. The surrounding soils had not been burned, indicating that these fires were discrete events. Geophysical analyses showed that two of the baked soil features had been burned at 200°C–400°C, about the temperature of an open campfire, and although brushfires combust at similar temperatures, they do not burn the soils as deeply. Further, some stone artifacts had been altered by heat, but other tools had not—again pointing to a controlled burn instead of a broad conflagration.

Five hundred kilometers to the south, another site with evidence of early fire was found at Chesowanja, where a cluster of baked clay lumps appears to have been an ancient hearth. Stone tools surround the cluster, and a fragment of skull apparently came from the robust form of Australopithecus. The site is dated to about 1.42 million years old.

Gesher Benot Ya’aqov is located in northern Israel on the banks of the Jordan River.⁴⁰ Acheulian hand-axes were found at the site in the 1930s, but excavations over the last twenty years have led to a remarkable picture of Middle Paleolithic life. The site is partially water logged, and plant remains have been found from wild grapes, water chestnuts, wild olive, wild pistachio, acorns, and jujube. Small pitted stones were used to crack nuts. The bones of small game like hares and hyrax were found. Stone tools were abundant: basalt bifacial hand-axes and cleavers, limestone choppers, flint cores, and flake tools. The flint had been carried from sources at least ten kilometers away. And there is solid evidence for fire. Not only were burned seeds and wood recovered from Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, but there were two clusters of burned flints. Flints were burned only in these two clusters, and not in other areas of the site—suggesting that fires were contained and intentional. And this occurred 790,000 years ago.

. . .

So with all the caveats in place and in mind, the archaeological pursuit of the elusive traces of ancient home seems to lead us to this conclusion. Long before the first Homo sapiens left Africa, more distant relatives journeyed into Europe and Asia. Between about 1.4 and 0.7 million years ago, hominids created the sites that we can recognize as temporary encampments. More anchored than chimp or gorilla nests, these sites were places of arrival and return, locations where our ancestors made stone tools and cooked over ancient fires. Little suggests that these encampments were imbued with deep meanings or emotional attachments that are so common in later human homes. Rather, these earliest camps are probably yet another example of cultural practices as extended phenotype, to recall Richard Dawkins’s phrase. In its simplest forms, home was a place where fires, tools, and basic shelters co-occurred, but—and this is extremely important—those forms of home varied. Unlike oriole nests or beaver dens, the earliest hominid residences were not identical “constructions,” but differed based on the resources used, the duration of stay, and the local environment. These earliest sites—consisting of little more than hearths and stone scatters—contain evidence of the origins of that fundamental human project, the creation of home.