Homes began in caves long before mudbrick courtyards
A home is a lasting or semi-lasting shelter for people—and sometimes pets—where sleep, cooking, and hygiene happen. Forms range from apartments and yurts to virtual spaces. Evidence of cave living reaches back at least a million years for Homo erectus at Zhoukoudian.
Southern African sea caves sheltered early modern humans about 180,000 years ago as they first exploited marine food, aiding later expansions. The oldest known site is PP13B at Pinnacle Point, and huts and longhouses have served as dwellings since the late Neolithic. By the Bronze Age, Mesopotamians at Uruk and Ubaid were laying uniform mudbricks with bitumen mortar into houses around small courtyards, lined along straight streets with shared wells and ovens.
After Rome’s western fall, many Europeans returned to timber or wattle huts while elites kept stone halls; by the twelfth century manor houses often featured great halls and defenses. Medieval towns packed narrow streets with timber-framed hall houses whose jettied upper floors overhung the road.
Other early builders developed their own plans. Egyptian towns such as Amarna and Deir el-Medina packed flat-roofed mudbrick houses along narrow lanes, each with a reception room, private chambers and a work courtyard. In the Indus Valley, Mohenjo-daro and Harappa used standard fired bricks for two-storey homes with private wells, drained indoor bathrooms and south-facing courtyards for ventilation. At Knossos on Crete, living quarters had light wells and lustral basins for ritual purity. By the first century BC, wealthy Romans lived in a domus arranged around an atrium and garden, while most crowded into fire-prone apartment blocks called insulae.
Today a home may be a house or apartment, a houseboat, trailer or yurt, or even a virtual space, and researchers study it through ideas ranging from belonging and homesickness to exile and homelessness.
Source: Home
