Out of Eden – and under a roof

Our ancestors someway back down the hominid line actually evolved to live in the trees and these gave them all the protection and shelter they needed. At some point, however – and no one is quite sure why – they decided to eschew their idyllic arboreal lifestyle, climbing down to live on the plains.There might have been more to eat down there, such as the high energy brain-food meat that was not readily available up in the branches, but it also left them rather more exposed to the weather and predators. One solution to this was to live in caves, but the stock of such dwellings turned out to be rather limited. And thus the first structures built by mankind were rudimentary tents made out of bamboo and animal skins. Again, this stage in the human story might strike us as a rather carefree way of life. So the same question arises: why complicate things and add stress to our lives?

But that’s exactly what we did. Eventually we started to erect the first proper stone buildings, such as at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey.
The 11,000 year-old complex is the earliest known example of a well-planned scheme to build permanent stone structures, predating Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. It looks very much to have been a place of worship and ritual for hunters, rather than for settled farmers and villagers. This turns on its head the previously accepted view that agriculture developed first and that later, through the cooperation needed for this kind of enterprise, technological prowess increased up to the point where we were able to build towns, cities, and then establish institutions such as religion. In order to construct these buildings skilled artisans and workers were needed – and needed to be trained and fed, which required housing, which then needed more sophisticated agriculture and horticulture, as well as further technological advances elsewhere. In the light of this, it would seem that buildings are not the result of civilisation, but are instead the starting point – and that the reason for building them in the first place was not to improve our material well-being, but a spiritual need, something that bound us together, rather than due to any technological advances that had already taken place.

The fashionable theory at the moment is that tools and technology (in which I include buildings) have become part of the evolution of our species. Since we always seem able to invent better tools for extracting the most energy-filled nutrients from our environment, our species is then able to expand in such numbers to necessitate the invention of ever more sophisticated technology to keep feeding it, and the cycle then repeats. Tools ‘R’ now Us, in a very real sense. And if we ever stop coming up with better, more effective tools, we would stop being “human” – and possibly become extinct, too. This, however, seems like a very deterministic view of human development. In fact, we can actually choose to build or not to build – and Göbekli Tepe provides us with a prime example of this. The step taken by those ancient people in pre-history wasn’t one designed to improve our material well-being or our general happiness. By the looks of it – with the stress it eventually added to our lives, the less healthy diet, the neverending back-breaking work – it certainly didn’t. The reason why we left the Garden of Eden was simply because we could.

In the end, we don’t build cities out of some instinct to ingest the most calories possible, but because we found that we actually can build them. For sure, we could have chosen the easier life and remained hunter-gatherers – or even never to have come down from the trees in the first place. But what we did turned out to be a lot more exciting and fulfilling than staying put. In the end, the decision we took was a human one. Fast-forwarding to the present day, this shows us that buildings are not merely a product of our civilisation, but the alpha and omega of it. Whenever I see a new development go up, this is what I feel – that humans are successfully being human, rather than being content to munch on fruit on a branch, as our ancestors did millions of years ago. They might have been healthier and happier than we are – but few of us would want to trade places with them.