How Humans Came to Construct Their Worlds

To provide a novel perspective on architecture, the meeting opens with a discussion of the construction of bird nests as a model for human construction (of buildings, drawing and language) – a case for this approach has been offered by (Arbib, Fragaszy, Healy, & Stout, 2023).

As distinct from the buildings of termites (interesting though these are), bird nests offer a more apropos point of comparison for human buildings – they are conducted by single vertebrate (or a few) and can be adapted to varied circumstances, with even a small effect of social learning (Healy, 2023; Healy, Tello-Ramos, & Hébert, 2023). However, the basic Bauplan remains species-specific, unlike the creativity of the human architect.

Since nonhuman primates lack much in the way of flexible vocal control and learning, birdsong has become a powerful model for brain mechanisms of human vocal learning – even though birdsong lacks the syntax and compositional semantics of human language. Similarly, nonhuman primates lack interesting building skills, and so we suggest that bird nest construction may come to play a similar comparative role for architectural design. The static Bauplan of birds can be compared to the near-stasis of human tool use until the end of the Paleolithic, challenging us to assess the changes in human practice that unlocked an increasingly rapid process of cultural evolution.

Related publications:
1. Architectural traditions in the structures built by cooperative weaver birds
2. Cultural traditions, not genetics or environment, inform nest architecture among white-browed sparrow weaver birds

Humans construct their physical worlds in part by designing and constructing new tools, habitations, and in due course diverse buildings and, in some cases, towns and cities (but also change the environment in many other ways) and construct their symbolic worlds by putting words together to tell stories, articulate plans, tell lies, seek truth, and much more (Arbib, 2012, 2021). This talk offers hypotheses that address a key question for anthropogeny: How did biological evolution yield humans with the “construction-ready brains” and bodies that made us capable of the cultural evolution that created the diversity of our mental and physical constructs that we know today? The framework for all this is EvoDevoSocio – the idea that biological evolution yields biological mechanisms for both development and adult function of members of a species, but that social interaction is an important part of that environment, and that in humans cultural evolution has played the crucial role in changing the social, physical and increasingly symbolic and technological environments in which most humans now develop.

Human “place-making” began to emerge when early humans began making the hearth the center of social life perhaps a million years ago. Some time after they had begun to use caves in southwest Asia around 450 kya (thousand years ago), they also sometimes buried a dead member of their group under the floor, linking memory-making to place-making. Hunter-gatherer groups began to settle at least seasonally from around 24 kya, and from 13,000 BCE groups were creating settlements formed of permanent stone buildings. Relatively large, permanently co-resident communities became the norm from the beginning of the Holocene period. The archaeological Neolithic, represents a transformation of the cultural niche, involving major environmental-economic, social and cultural innovations, among which was the emergence of architecture, the making of monuments and the creation of systems of material symbolic representation. The “built environments” of the Epipalaeolithic-Neolithic transformation in southwest Asia were “designs for social living”. The Neolithic – 9600-6000 BCE – was an extraordinarily dynamic period that saw emergent, proto-urban, hierarchical settlement patterns, complex economic relations, and new technologies. Neolithic communities were an expensive and demanding way of living together in dense, richly symbolic, social townscapes that were cultural and social landscapes of memory such that we can recognize them through their architecture and rituals as the first “imagined communities.”

The transition from Neolithic villages to early cities marked the greatest social transformation faced by our species before the Industrial Revolution. Our ancestors had to learn how to live in new settlements that had more people, higher densities, and more activities than had been known previously. The new adaptations to urban life involved changes in society and social processes, not just individual learning. Some changes came about through social interactions in a process called energized crowding; these include innovations in housing and the use of space, and the establishment of neighborhoods in cities. Other changes were driven by powerful new institutions, including formal governments and social classes. Cities had both negative effects (crowding, crime, and poverty) and positive outcomes (cities quickly became the generators of economic change and prosperity). I ask whether ancient cities—and they ways they responded to shocks—might hold useful insights for the development of urban adaptations to climate change today. This talk expands on themes from my recent book (Smith 2023).

This talk explores the needs of the poor and homeless around the world, charting the interplay between formal and informal settlements (Stiphany & Ward, 2019; Werthmann, 2021). The key example for this talk will be the favelas of Saõ Paulo in the context of a broader concern with Latin American urbanism and the role of individual initiative, social forces and politics as agencies of urban transformation. Built environments are to be seen not only as technological artifacts but also as providing a spatial politics for transforming where and how vulnerable communities immigrate to cities. Key questions arise concerning the relation of informal housing to the formal infrastructural systems of cities, including access to utilities.