Finally, John Howard Payne was home.
. . .
Exile and longing, wandering and return—for humans there is no place like home. These complex attachments originated among our distant hominid ancestors, millions of years in the past. “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests,” Jesus observed before contrasting animal domesticity with his own wanderings. Astoundingly varied constructions are built by animals, and it is tempting to trace a connecting line from nests and dens to condos and tipis.
For all animals, including humans, constructions extend the bodily limits of existence. As the Nobel Laureate Karl von Frisch observed, “The most usual purpose of building activities in animals is to make a home that will give protection,”6 but animal constructions also serve as traps, pantries, stages for mating and display, climate control systems, nurseries, roadways, and so on. Animal constructions protect offspring, regulate moisture and humidity, ventilate gasses, communicate information, and camouflage occupants.7
Such constructions are sometimes considered examples of what Richard Dawkins has called “the extended phenotype,” the external manifestations of natural selection at the genetic level that extend beyond the organism. In Dawkins’s view, the creation of nests and dens, burrows and webs is driven by the essential genetic objectives: survival and reproduction.8
Such fundamental evolutionary drives have produced some astounding constructions. Termites can build towering nests 20 feet tall and excavate wells 150 feet deep, yet the animals are only one-tenth of an inch long; at a human scale these would be constructions 2½ miles tall and excavations 20 miles deep. Termite nests house several million inhabitants and are built by small individual insects laboring in the dark.9
Similarly, it is worth recalling that the largest construction on earth that is visible from outer space is not the Great Wall of China, as usually claimed (see chapter 7), but Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, a 1,600-milelong structure made by organisms no longer than your fingernail.
Despite such awe-inspiring features of the natural world, not all animals build. As the biologist Mike Hansell has written, “The occurrence of building behaviors is neither confined to a narrow range of taxa nor scattered evenly through the animal kingdom. Instead, it has a few outbursts of virtuosity with talented displays of skill occurring sporadically across the animal spectrum.”10
The most stunning architects in the nonhuman world are spiders, mites, insects, and birds. Our closest animal relations—chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas—are uninspired builders. Nest-building by chimpanzees and bonobos is a fairly impromptu construction process.11 Both species settle nightly in trees, building nests of branches, sometimes with rough thatchings of leaves. As night falls, the apes groom each other, rest, and mate in their arboreal love-nests—behaviors in common with many modern humans. Unlike most of us, however, chimps do not eat in bed.
In field studies of chimpanzee and bonobo nesting behavior, one of the few patterns common to all the study-groups is that they avoid nesting in trees with ripe fruit. The height of nests varies based on environment: constructed 15–80 feet above the ground, nests tended to be higher in wetter environments or during the rainy season. Nests tend to be regularly spaced, but this may differ based on the threat of predators. Most nests are only occupied once, although in some study groups as many as one-third of the nests were reoccupied, but only when the a particular food source attracted the nomadic troop to linger in a particular locale.
Regardless of these variations, all chimpanzees build nests each night. The primatologist W.C. McGrew writes, “There is nothing more predictable in chimpanzee daily life than this universal behavioral sequence and its artifactual outcome. It is the cornerstone of chimpanzee nature.”12
Since they are imposing animals, gorillas worry less about predators—except for human poachers—and their homes reflect this nonchalance.13 Given their large bulk, gorillas tend to nest on the ground, although occasionally they nest in trees. The primatologist Dian Fossey described their nests as “sturdy, compact structures, sometimes resembling oval, leafy bathtubs.”14 The mountain gorilla, as the biologist George Schaller documented, “stands or sits, and pulls, breaks, or bends in vegetation which it places around and under its body.” Regardless of their basic construction technique, “the precise method employed varies with the particular circumstance—whether the nest is in a tree or on the ground, whether it is on a steep slope or a flat area.”15 Similar to the chimpanzees, gorillas apparently reoccupy nests only when abundant fruits or other foods tempt them to stay in an area.16
In less than five minutes, a gorilla can make a treetop nest, bending down the branches in a tree’s crown or weaving limbs into a platform bed. Ground-level nests take even less time, built from a few handfuls of foliage roughly arranged in less than thirty seconds.17
But what are the functions of the nests built by chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas?
There are several possible answers.18 Arboreal nests may protect sleeping primates from predators, although various monkeys sleep in trees without building nests. Sleeping in treetops may protect primates from mosquitoes and other biting insects that transmit diseases. One of the strongest explanations links nest building and body heat, the “thermoregulation hypothesis,” because the differences appear linked to local environment and weather. Unlike other animals—whose constructions are uniform, presumably because those behaviors are genetically hardwired—higher apes appear to have a basic drive to nest, but vary their constructions based on local circumstances. As the authors of one study of gorillas living in the Congo put it, the variations in nests “appear to be in response to wet and cool conditions, clearly suggesting that the gorillas call on innate nest-building tendencies with a quite flexible, adaptive specificity.”19
These findings suggest that the nests built by African apes differ from other examples of animal architecture in one fundamental regard: the constructions vary in response to local conditions. While we recognize that modern apes are not our hominid ancestors, it is interesting to realize that, like these primate relatives, all humans make shelters but do so in different ways. It may be that this common adaptive propensity is the essential connection. Despite the variations and differences between ape nests and human dwellings, there exists this broad connection, leading one primatologist to ask, “Was there no place like home?”20
. . .
As of this writing, the oldest home I have excavated is merely 6,000 years old. In June and July of 2006, I directed excavations in far northern Peru at a small prehistoric site called El Porvenir. I had first seen the site in 1996 during an archaeological reconnaissance near the border between Peru and Ecuador; it had taken ten years to raise the funds to return and excavate the site (not an uncommon occurrence in archaeology).
El Porvenir caught my attention and drew me back a decade later because I thought it would contain evidence of ancient homes. The site consisted of a group of six earthen mounds around an open space, which I assumed was a cluster of house mounds around a central plaza. El Porvenir covered an area a bit larger than a football field, 120 × 90 meters. The mounds were simple ovals, 10 to 30 meters at their bases, and the tallest mound was only 1.6 meters tall. The mounds were noticeable, but not impressive. What these surface details suggested was this: these were not monumental constructions or carefully built public architecture, but rather simple mounds probably containing archaeological evidence of ancient dwellings and households. And that is why I excavated El Porvenir.
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