In contemporary usage in Western society, the first definition of a home might be a weathertight place with a fixed address where you can sleep at night and go about your personal business by day. Even in this age of online placelessness, such a home is nearly an entry requirement to adult American society. Sure, in theory you can acquire a job, a voter registration card, and various forms of identification without one. Still, mainstream social norms dictate that most everyone should live under a roof and inside walls, and anyone else is either bending the rules a little or has no other options.
But at its core (or maybe its foundation), a home is an old invention, and its importance might be more about imagination than about structure. Many animals—from hummingbirds to great apes—make nests. Even a butterfly will look for a hiding place to rest. A number of animals are builders—termites, ants, beavers, weaverbirds. It is impossible to know fully how animals perceive or feel about these kinds of homes.
But at least for humans, home is far more than just engineering; it is also a combination of meaning, symbolism, and social function. If we are going to survive this mercurial moment in the planet’s history, we may need to revisit the rules of what constitutes such a place.
What is the most essential nature of home? You could answer this question from an endless number of angles. One is to dig back to the root, to consult our ancestors, to sift through clues about the earliest human moments on this planet.
In the late 1970s, a young anthropologist named Richard Potts embarked on an eighteen-month research trip to study what scientists thought were proto-homes, about 1.8 million years old, in the middle of the Serengeti Plain in Tanzania.
The Serengeti is, in most ways, one of the wildest, least human-engineered spots on Earth—an arid expanse of grass and acacia trees where more than a million shaggy wildebeests travel annually in a north-south circuit, pursued by everything that wishes to eat them—lions, cheetahs, hyenas, wild dogs. But one of the most human places stands in the center of all of this animal activity, Olduvai Gorge, probably the most famous fossil bed in the world, where a now-dried-up river carved through layers of sediment collected in a now-dried-up lake bed, exposing millions of years of bones and other remains. In the mid-twentieth century, Mary and Louis Leakey found some of the first known fossils of our hominid ancestors here, eventually demonstrating that human origins lie in Africa.
Potts quite literally followed in the Leakeys’ footsteps—petitioning Mary for permission to reexamine the bones and stone tools that she had collected and that were kept at the National Museums of Kenya. He also spent a month with Mary at Olduvai examining the geology of the site. He was especially interested in the excavations at a place called Bed I, the bed of an ancient lake and streams where sediments are layered on top of countless bone fragments from zebra, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, antelope, pig, giraffe, elephant. And mixed with these were the bones of Homo habilis, the “handy man,” the long-armed, strong-jawed human ancestor who made stone tools from flaked and sharpened rocks so he could butcher what he hunted and eat the meat and the marrow.
Then and now, anthropologists have debated what constitutes a human home. If you find a scattering of stone tools, does this evidence mean humans were at home here? Is a home a hut? Is it a hearth? Or is it just a spot where a person used to sleep at night?
Many researchers had assumed that the bones the Leakeys had found strewn about here, left behind by these handy men and women, were evidence of the earliest sort of home—or rather home bases, an anthropological term for an area to which humans returned again and again to eat and socialize, a sort of campsite. Mary also believed that a circular arrangement of rock she found at Bed I was the foundation of a hut.
But just the act of bringing food to a designated spot to share might be an indication that humans thought of this as a home. “What does it mean to be human?” Potts muses, four decades later. “We take it so much for granted that when we go out and we find food, we hardly ever just sit down in a supermarket, tear open the packaging, and just start eating,” as a large predator like a lion might do with a recent kill. “We delay our eating of the food and bring it to some other place, often with an expectation of sharing with others,” and the places where we eat together take on significance as part of home.
But as Potts studied the bones, he developed doubts about whether Homo habilis had really made a home out of these particular locations. On closer examination, the alleged hut Mary had excavated looked suspect, more like a pattern created by tree roots growing in a rocky substrate than by hands, without enough human artifacts within its perimeter to seem lived-in.
The bones revealed an even more complicated picture. Using a scanning electron microscope, which can distinguish details that are only a few microns wide, Potts came up with a technique for differentiating marks on the bones—those left behind by stone blades versus scrapes and punctures from animal teeth. On the bones from Bed I, he spotted “a heck of a lot of not only tool and butchery marks but also bite marks made by the teeth of hyenas and even larger-sized potential predators.” These animals had gnawed on various prey and left teeth marks on a few Homo habilis bones as well. In other words, our hominid ancestors were most likely feasting in this spot sometimes, but so were large, powerful animals with sharp teeth. “And it struck me that these earliest supposed best examples of a home actually were pretty incredibly dangerous places to hang around.”
To Potts’s mind, you couldn’t call something home if you couldn’t safely bring your children, your elders, or the sick to gather there with you. At this stage in our evolutionary journey, perhaps we had learned to share but not yet to protect one another.
Maybe this wasn’t the right place to seek refuge. Or maybe it was just too early. Maybe we hadn’t found our way home yet.
To follow the human fossil record through the next couple million years is like rummaging through the tattered belongings of long-gone, far-flung family members. When we manage to find any surviving scraps they left behind, we try to write a story about who they were, where we came from, and who we’ve become. Some of those scraps offer little clues about the habits of our ancestors and the ways they related to the planet. And some of them reveal as much or more about our modern presumptions about what makes a home.
Homo habilis had various descendants or maybe cousins (depending on how you draw and prune the human evolutionary tree). These people, our forebears, or perhaps our aunts and uncles, wandered across thousands of miles. Step one million years forward in the geologic record (and three decades forward in time from Potts’s first study) and you arrive in what is now Israel. Here are the remains of what are probably the oldest-known hearths. In the mid-2000s, a team of archaeologists led by Naama Goren-Inbar found bits of flint, which makes a good fire starter because it sparks when struck. At the edge of a lake, the scientists discovered crumbs of scorched rock, wood, and charcoal and the skillfully severed bones of deer, butchered with stone tools—eight hundred thousand years old, based on carbon dating and other methods. Eventually the scientists sifted through and analyzed the flint bits for their thermoluminescence, how much light they emitted when heated and what that meant about whether they had burned in the past. The researchers made a compelling case that these were the oldest-known hearths, which may have been left behind by stocky, big-browed people with flat faces named Homo heidelbergensis. There were no huts found here or other signs of either simple or elaborate architecture, but this looked much more like a home than the place Potts had studied. There were hand axes, choppers, scrapers, awls made of stone—and what looked like the division of space into various tasks, toolmaking in one spot, fish-cleaning in another, nut-roasting elsewhere.* There was plenty of evidence of deliberate place-making and a set of activities that suggested the residents had learned to look after one another.
Step another half million years forward in the fossil record, and you arrive in the French Riviera, to a site excavated in the mid-1960s, about a decade before Potts’s first fieldwork. About four hundred thousand years ago, Homo heidelbergensis made a camp on what is now a busy street in Nice. French archaeologist Henry de Lumley stumbled across the site almost by accident, when builders were clearing it for a new apartment complex and the bulldozers turned up “Paleolithic implements.” De Lumley recounted the discovery in the popular magazine Scientific American. The place was “scarcely 300 yards from Nice’s commercial harbor” and “near the corner of Boulevard Carnot and an alley romantically named Terra Amata (beloved land).” The builders paused, and then three hundred field researchers, including archaeology students and some excited volunteers, spent the next five months rummaging through the dirt.
Here de Lumley and his exuberant team found evidence of a series of huts, each in an elongated shape with curved walls made of branches (evident from fossilized postholes) and a hearth at the center. “One of the earliest of the huts is perfectly outlined by an oval of stones, some as much as a foot in diameter and some even stacked one on the other. The living floor within the oval consisted of a thick bed of organic matter and ash,” he wrote. “A little wall, made by piling up cobbles or pebbles, stands at the northwest side of each hearth”—he interpreted these walls as windscreens to protect the flames.
After de Lumley was done, the French built a block of apartments on top of the site, and ultimately placed a museum therein, the Musée de Préhistoire de Terra Amata, which remains there today.
But if home or home base are fundamentally human, it’s hard to argue that these crude huts are the defining examples of them: the fossil record doesn’t offer up anything quite like this for another 375,000 years or so. If walls and roofs define a human home, why didn’t our ancestors build more of them over all of those millennia?
In the years since de Lumley’s find, a few scholars have questioned whether the artifacts there really tell a clear story about the site’s occupants, because over time, erosion, seawater, or animals may have intruded. Still for decades, Terra Amata has been heralded by many as the earliest example of human architecture, the oldest houses.
But the huts are not the only important milestones from this ancient era of human homemaking. Our ancestors had landed on some other elements that were perhaps more central to human lives, well-being, and survival: the sharing of food, cooperation, and the act of place-making—altering a space to keep yourself and the people you care about safer and more comfortable. Homemaking can be a simple and imaginative act. Maybe we would do well to heed what they knew.
Search through the many layers and decades of evolutionary science for the moment when our own species, Homo sapiens, began inhabiting the Earth, and you will find several origin stories colliding with one another. Such stories can be dazzling and fascinating, but under scrutiny, sometimes they reveal as much about the biases of researchers and of Western culture as they do about the habits of our species.
The earliest stories about Homo sapiens had a Eurocentric orientation—a reflection of the worldviews of the anthropologists and archaeologists who conducted the research. One version—which held sway for decades but is now considered incorrect by many scholars—goes like this: the first Homo sapiens (our species, the “thinking” or “wise people”) who appeared in Africa had anatomy like ours but hadn’t yet developed modern smarts. And for years, scientists dated the Homo sapiens birthday, the moment we first stepped on the Earth, at about a hundred thousand years before the present. Then about forty thousand years ago or so, Homo sapiens moved into Europe and Asia and perhaps triggered the demise, one way or another, of the Neanderthals. According to this story, it wasn’t until around this moment that we also developed what anthropologists call “symbolic reasoning”—a technical name for what is fundamentally the human imagination, the ability to step back and engage in abstract thought, the tendency to solve difficult problems, tell inventive stories, and dream elaborate dreams. That capacity was on full display at places like Chauvet Cave in France, where the thinking people left behind graceful and intricate charcoal paintings of animals such as aurochs, ibex, reindeer, and panthers on a rock wall around thirty-five thousand years ago. Just before those paintings went up, the story goes, we were blessed with some sudden and magnificent change in our brains—a “neurological advance, perhaps promoting the fully modern capacity for rapidly articulated phonemic speech,” wrote Stanford anthropologist Richard Klein in 1998. This was the so-called human revolution, some moment of biological enlightenment. Scientist and popular author Jared Diamond was even blunter: “That is the time when we finally ceased to be just another species of big mammal,” he insisted in his book The Third Chimpanzee, originally published in 1991. (Diamond’s statement is arguably anthropocentric and betrays a lot of cultural bias. Do we really have so much more sophistication than a humpback whale or an African elephant, species that develop their own cultures? Were we really not humans until we started to create the things that Western societies would recognize as “civilized”?)
These scientists contended that our newfound intelligence also led some twelve thousand years ago to the “Neolithic Revolution,” the unfurling of human agriculture, the moment humans started planting grains and building stationary homes so they could tend crops. Many scholars argue that crop cultivation is the most impactful dietary, cultural, and societal decision humans have ever made.
And if this is your story about our species’ arrival on Earth, you might say that the human sense of home arose from these two developments. We got smart. Then we started munching on grains. After we settled down in villages in places like the Levant in the Middle East, we transferred our “individual loyalty from the mobile social group to a particular place,” argues Ian Tattersall, paleoanthropologist with the American Museum of Natural History, in a 2013 essay. Maybe only then did we feel at home, in a true modern sense.
If this is your story, the making of home might also be inseparable from our more destructive tendencies. “Adopting a fixed residence went hand-in-hand with cultivating fields and domesticating animals,” Tattersall continued. The first human villagers in the Levant “locked themselves into a lifestyle, and to make the field continuously productive to feed their growing families, they had to modify their landscape. Today, we carry out such modifications on a huge scale, and nature occasionally bites back, sometimes with a vengeance.” If this is your story, you might think humans could never be at home without dramatically rearranging our surroundings to suit our own needs and desires, potentially making a mess of the land around us—and, eventually, of the atmosphere.
But many other scholars have since contested these claims of sudden, epic transformations in the human mind. The view looks different from other continents. As scientists spent more time digging through the evidence from Africa, the “human revolution” concept didn’t seem to resemble the reality emerging from the dirt. The origin of Homo sapiens moved backward in time as older finds appeared, including a pair of modern human skulls from Ethiopia that were originally discovered in 1967 by Richard Leakey (Mary Leakey’s son) but weren’t dated until 2005—when newer, more accurate techniques were available. Using radioactive argon (similar to carbon dating), scientists discovered the skulls were nearly 200,000 years old. And it seemed improbable to some experts that our species puttered along for at least 150,000 years and then had a sudden epiphany. In 2000, two scientists, including a colleague who worked with Potts in Kenya, Alison Brooks, wrote a hundred-page refutation of the “human revolution”: the whole idea reeked of a “profound Eurocentric bias and a failure to appreciate the depth and breadth of the African archaeological record.”
Over the next few years, some new findings effectively blew the lid off the old story. At one archaeological site, in 2007, an archaeologist named Curtis Marean announced that he and his team of researchers had found far earlier signs of symbolic reasoning. They had been nosing into caves on the coast of the Indian Ocean in South Africa for about a decade. In one cave in particular—where a local ostrich farmer built them a wooden staircase for easy access—they dug up fifty-seven bits of pigment, most of them ochre (rusty red-orange and made from clay that is high in iron), some ground into powder. These were left behind by members of our species who lived there more than a hundred thousand years ago. The only real usefulness of these materials to a literal caveman or woman would be for painting on rock or skin, an act that would be meaningless to a person who lacked imagination. There were also sharp and sophisticated pieces of stone blades mixed with layers of ash.† And there were piles of shells. The people who used this cave appeared to also be the first known seafood-eaters, feasting heavily on brown mussels and sea snails. But the tides here were fierce and the mussel-covered rocks treacherous, and Marean believed that the only way to successfully and safely harvest these shellfish would be to study and enumerate the lunar phases and movement of ocean currents. To live here, to feel at home in this place, you needed a sophisticated sense of time, an understanding of the past and future and the patterns of change on the landscape. You needed smarts and imagination.
Meanwhile in Kenya, Potts, Brooks, and a crew of about four dozen people had unearthed a new set of tools and other traces of very-long-departed people at a place about 120 miles northeast of Olduvai Gorge. Like Olduvai, this place was a dried-up lake bed sliced apart by erosion—in a flat, silty, open area with hills and ridges rising all around it. In the exposed sediment layers, the scientists found one set of artifacts that were about five hundred thousand to one million years old and a newer set from about three hundred thousand years ago. Potts began studying the older tools in the 1980s, but he and his collaborators didn’t start investigating the newer ones until 2002. And in the more recent of the two eras, someone was making stone tools that looked a lot like the handiwork of Homo sapiens, acquiring pigments like ochre and manganese (which is black), and collecting obsidian, a volcanic form of glass that can be made into especially sharp blades. None of these raw materials existed nearby; they were sourced across distances of up to sixty miles as the crow flies, but perhaps four times as far (more than two hundred miles) by foot through the ridged landscape. To procure such things across difficult terrain, you would probably need to trade with other people, the scientists reasoned. And to do that, you would require a mental map of these places, a sense of where you came from and whom you might be trading with, and a sort of early social network. You would need memory and imagination and learning.
The scientists dug and scanned and analyzed what they found in Kenya, and at the end, “we kind of looked at each other, my colleagues and I, and we said, ‘This is us,’” Potts recalls. This was Homo sapiens, making our way through the East African Rift Valley long ago, with what seemed like a fully developed sense of human imagination.
In 2017, another skull—originally found in a Moroccan cave decades previously—made headlines after its age was reexamined with newer and more precise scientific dating techniques. It turned out to be three hundred thousand years old, much older than was previously believed, and probably one of ours, Homo sapiens.
We were an older species than scientists had previously believed, and we had been smart for a long time.
We had used these smarts and imagination to build deep relationships with the places where we started, to learn how to survive and adapt, and this was probably the true root of the human home.
Climate studies show that in the early existence of Homo sapiens, we survived an unpleasant and inhospitable ice age, when the planet turned cold and dry and threatened to evict us. Then around seventy thousand years ago, the human diaspora out of Africa began. From there we headed to five other continents—to places of ice and heat, forest and desert, coast and mountain. But there were no signs of enduring buildings for many more millennia. On the entire African continent, no scientist has yet turned up reliable evidence of any permanent dwelling structure made by early humans (though, of course, only a structure that is either exceptionally sturdy or well protected from the elements can survive that long, and even then, a scientist would need a certain amount of luck to find it). One of the oldest-known examples of early Homo sapiens architecture is a massive structure found in southwestern Russia and comprised of the bones of sixty mammoths, circa twenty-five thousand years ago. And even this doesn’t look quite like home; in its enormity, it is more like an ancient cathedral or meeting hall. Maybe the things we built to live in before this date had eroded away. Or maybe we made ephemeral camps only.‡
But in the newer retelling of the human story, if we were so smart and so inventive by the time we began to migrate around the world, it seems difficult to argue that we lacked a sense of home. Home feels so fundamental to the human psyche. Home is part of our “psychological machinery,” Curtis Marean said, when I contacted him to ask about the origin of home. He puzzled over the question at first, because home is so often associated with a physical house. But then he acknowledged that there has to be something deep-rooted about our desires for home. “When I use those words, I’m talking about cognitive structures, and cognitive structures come from evolution.” How could humans have wandered the planet for so many generations and had no sense of home?
Richard Potts argues that the quintessential characteristic of humanity isn’t really a hut or an elaborate village. It is some combination of our adaptability and our imagination.
If we are looking for the human home, maybe it’s not a thing but a story.
In some of the most ancient cultures on Earth, home is a place one belongs to, a place of safety and a gathering point for reestablishing social connection. “Home is a place or places on the landscape that you are somehow connected to,” archaeologist Margaret Conkey, who has studied Paleolithic sites in France, said in an interview with Canadian science writer Jude Isabella in 2013. “It’s also a conceptual and symbolic notion as to where people are from, where they relate to, and where certain important aspects of their lives take place. Home is a place where you reconnect with people or memories.”
And in some of the most enduring cultures, home is a place you care for—as if it were your family. “We call the country mother,” a man from the Warlpiri Aboriginal community in the Australian desert told anthropologist Michael Jackson. “The mother gives everything, like the land.… So when you think of where you were born you think of the country.… You have to look after it.”
Humans have never before made a home under this kind of sky, within the sorts of climatic conditions that we have now created. In May 2021, the observatory at Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawai‘i logged an average atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration of 419 parts per million. From measurements taken from glacial ice cores, the last time the Earth’s reading was anywhere near that high was at least four million years ago, two million years before the handy people were chiseling tools at Olduvai. The climate has never changed so quickly or so violently in all of human existence. Because there is a time lag between the increase in atmospheric carbon and the shift in the planet’s temperature, we have yet to witness how bad it may get. According to the IPCC, even with the most ambitious efforts to control carbon emissions, “it could take twenty to thirty years to see global temperatures stabilize.” And with the worst case, the highest emissions, the planet could warm to such a catastrophic level that we would barely recognize this Earth at all.
I have inherited my human ancestors’ imagination and capacity for storytelling. But I am not a Luddite or a primitivist. We will never go back to those first hearths. And I am not so naive as to think that a story can save us altogether.
But in the last several years, human societies have engaged in a project of unimagination, of ignoring or denying the signs of climate catastrophe, of distancing ourselves from the way the landscape is changing. We have built and engineered and expanded and created short-term gains for ourselves but neglected part of the equation of home—to know the place we are living on, to heed it, to take care of it.
And I think that we may not make it through this crisis if we forget that home isn’t just a thing we build, but an awareness of and care for our surroundings and the capacity to imagine new ways of living in them.
We will need to learn to relocate, to re-create, to reconnect and collaborate with one another across vast distances and cultures, to find safety, to make shelter, to contemplate the maps and models of the world and grasp what they are telling us about where the planet is headed. In short, we will need to be the thinking, wise people. We will need a new set of stories about what it looks like to live on the Earth in a manner that doesn’t destroy our future. We will need to figure out how to make a home in the greatest crisis we’ve ever known.