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.
CHAPTER 3
Mobile Homes
Let us never lose sight of our little rustic hut.
—Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture
The portaledge is a collapsible platform of tubing and rip-stop nylon that big-wall rock climbers use when a prolonged ascent requires spending nights out on a sheer rock face. First designed in the 1980s, the portaledge allows climbers to make multi-day ascents of big walls in regions with severe weather. It extends the climbers’ reach.1
The platform is just large enough for two climbers to sleep in. A web of nylon lines binds the portaledge to a central anchor point, such as a pair of expansion bolts drilled into solid rock. A separate protection point is placed away from the portaledge; other gear is snapped into this anchor especially metal carabineers, chock nuts, or ice axes that might attract lightening bolts. A small bucket dangles from a tent pole, supporting a tiny stove for heat and cooking. Covered with a durable tent designed to both shed moisture and allow air circulation, the portaledge is a secure, though improbable, refuge in a storm.
Few humans occupy such perilous environments as the vertical granite massif of El Capitan in the Yosemite
