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Authors: John L. Locke
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see clear evidence that many individuals spent their lives attempting to establish this boundary, without ever succeeding.
The first humans to build and occupy walled domiciles were strongly conflicted about their use. Walls were a new technology, one that paradoxically threatened the security of human groups while offering tempting opportunities for relief from mounting external pressures. It would be difficult to overstate the effect of walls on social monitoring, for they snatched from eyes and ears material that was essential to the management of peaceful and morally tidy villages. But, as we will see, domestication never gave our ancestors complete control over how much of their private life would be truly private.
If we could take a tour of the world as it existed fifteen thousand years ago, we would be able to see a great many of the human beings then alive. The missing ones would be the foragers and lovers who happened to be off in some leafy glade or desert duneswhen we went by, doing something that could only be done there. The rest would be
at or near their home base
, but they would not be
in their homes
. They had no homes.
Contrast this with a different tour, one that could be conducted almost anywhere in the world today. If we were to drive through any number of cities, we would see only a fraction of the citizens who live there and were actually there at the time. But the invisible people would not be
away
some place. They would be
there, at
home,
inside
. Herein lies the appeal of our demon, Asmodeus, who offered readers the fantastic possibility of peering under the rooftops of Madrid’s finest residences. Why did our more recent ancestors build and occupy homes and the earlier ones not do so? Was it just to tantalize and tease all the outsiders?
The road to domestication
The answer cannot be that
Homo sapiens
had no tools; even their own distant ancestor,
Homo ergaster
, could make these; nor can it be that they lacked building materials, because mud, wood, and stone were everywhere; or that they could not figure out how to build dwellings, because they had more than enough intelligence to do this. 3
But ecological factors were operating. At the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene, some ten thousand years ago, most people were still nomadic. They lived on wild food of one kind or another, from plants to large animals, and wild food had a habit of moving whenever it saw someone chasing it; or its own source of nutrition went elsewhere; or there was a change of seasons or the weather. 4 To spend much time building anything, or to make it larger or more secure than necessary, would have made no sense.
It would be easy to rest our explanation here, content that we had provided a respectable account of human domestication. The openly living nomads, according to our story, had no real reasons for living transparently, it was just easier than constructing something thatwould
coincidentally
have blocked the senses. But we already know that this is not correct. In the previous chapter we saw that our wild living ancestors craved sensory access to each other. Indeed, as egalitarians they would have had great difficulty living without it.
The need for constant relocation had to subside before it became labor-efficient to build permanent dwellings. Even when it did subside, however, dwellings were not built, and this suggests some degree of resistance to sensory interruption all along. We will discuss the source of this resistance shortly, but in the meantime we need to ask, what eroded our ancestors’ peripatetic ways?
Anthropologists differ as to the precise sequence of events, but certain factors can be identified. 5 One is the dissipation of large animal herds. Increasingly, hunters were returning with insufficient food to supply their small camps. A second factor—possibly related to the first—was an increase in the rate of population growth, increasing the competition for whatever large
The first humans to build and occupy walled domiciles were strongly conflicted about their use. Walls were a new technology, one that paradoxically threatened the security of human groups while offering tempting opportunities for relief from mounting external pressures. It would be difficult to overstate the effect of walls on social monitoring, for they snatched from eyes and ears material that was essential to the management of peaceful and morally tidy villages. But, as we will see, domestication never gave our ancestors complete control over how much of their private life would be truly private.
If we could take a tour of the world as it existed fifteen thousand years ago, we would be able to see a great many of the human beings then alive. The missing ones would be the foragers and lovers who happened to be off in some leafy glade or desert duneswhen we went by, doing something that could only be done there. The rest would be
at or near their home base
, but they would not be
in their homes
. They had no homes.
Contrast this with a different tour, one that could be conducted almost anywhere in the world today. If we were to drive through any number of cities, we would see only a fraction of the citizens who live there and were actually there at the time. But the invisible people would not be
away
some place. They would be
there, at
home,
inside
. Herein lies the appeal of our demon, Asmodeus, who offered readers the fantastic possibility of peering under the rooftops of Madrid’s finest residences. Why did our more recent ancestors build and occupy homes and the earlier ones not do so? Was it just to tantalize and tease all the outsiders?
The road to domestication
The answer cannot be that
Homo sapiens
had no tools; even their own distant ancestor,
Homo ergaster
, could make these; nor can it be that they lacked building materials, because mud, wood, and stone were everywhere; or that they could not figure out how to build dwellings, because they had more than enough intelligence to do this. 3
But ecological factors were operating. At the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene, some ten thousand years ago, most people were still nomadic. They lived on wild food of one kind or another, from plants to large animals, and wild food had a habit of moving whenever it saw someone chasing it; or its own source of nutrition went elsewhere; or there was a change of seasons or the weather. 4 To spend much time building anything, or to make it larger or more secure than necessary, would have made no sense.
It would be easy to rest our explanation here, content that we had provided a respectable account of human domestication. The openly living nomads, according to our story, had no real reasons for living transparently, it was just easier than constructing something thatwould
coincidentally
have blocked the senses. But we already know that this is not correct. In the previous chapter we saw that our wild living ancestors craved sensory access to each other. Indeed, as egalitarians they would have had great difficulty living without it.
The need for constant relocation had to subside before it became labor-efficient to build permanent dwellings. Even when it did subside, however, dwellings were not built, and this suggests some degree of resistance to sensory interruption all along. We will discuss the source of this resistance shortly, but in the meantime we need to ask, what eroded our ancestors’ peripatetic ways?
Anthropologists differ as to the precise sequence of events, but certain factors can be identified. 5 One is the dissipation of large animal herds. Increasingly, hunters were returning with insufficient food to supply their small camps. A second factor—possibly related to the first—was an increase in the rate of population growth, increasing the competition for whatever large
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