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The origin of buildings

[It’s just a theory, really….]

By JJ Jonker

Many years ago, just about right after the coming into existence of man – as in Homo Sapiens – the requirements for survival were very basic. This was well summed up by Maslow (a while later) as depicted graphically below:

Back then, man was mucking about pretty much at the bottom of this hierarchy, slowly progressing to Level 2, where as part of Safety and Security, shelter became an important issue. Primarily from the elements, but also from wild animals and later – following Cain’s poor example – against the attack of other groups wanting his possessions. The last parameter had not changed much over time and we still have the same problem today.

Now, as the anthropologists have discovered, man at the time was a hunter/gatherer. The men hunted, the women gathered. He lived in a cave which gave good shelter against the elements, but  was pretty much a sitting duck once trapped there by the Tsotsis of that time.

This was a major drawback, as he only became aware of any threat once it was upon him, and this was the main reason why a lifestyle change took place – moving into a more open environment. The challenge was now to design and put up a free-standing structure of some sort to provide the required shelter – this in itself being quite an evolution. Lateral thinking, we would call it today.

Once he had cleared the area – so he could see sufficiently into the distance – man reasoned that seeing as he now has this piece of bare level ground, he may as well plant something there. This would reduce his risk in getting killed during a hunting expedition and also extend significantly the time he could sit in the shade of a tree and drink beer.

He started cultivating the soil ploughing with some antelope which he captured and domesticated. Soon he was farming comfortably. Thus it came to be that all the activities on the lowest level of Maslow’s triangle had been accomplished, and it was now time to progress to the next level – shelter.

So he planted some posts interconnected with an inner and outer lattice of green boughs, filling the cavity with rocks. This worked really well in summer, due to the excellent ventilation and flow-through of air promoted by the gaps between these rocks.

During winter however, it was a very different story. The wind came right through these same gaps, and man realized that he needed to update his design in order to eliminate this problem. What to do, what to do …..

Then it hit him. Cowpats. Just pick them up from behind the plough and plaster the gaps between the rocks shut. And it worked real fine. Bear in mind that this came way before the invention of the wheel, so rates as a major discovery.

Seeing as man had used mostly bull dung for this plastering purpose and that the word “house” did not exist yet, he would at the end of a hard day’s ploughing announce: I’m going bulldung now”. Which meant that he was going home to have a beer.

Of course all this happened before man could even write, so this story was told around the fire, generation after generation, and by the time that it was actually recorded in writing, the term “bulldung” had become somewhat corrupted.

This was mainly due to ancient man’s migration downwards through Africa, and the way the colloquial pronunciation varied the further south he went. This is a natural phenomenon and still the case today, e.g. in Gauteng (north) the second vowel is pronounced ê, and in the Western Cape (south) as è. In the same way, “uh” changed to “ih”, and bulldung became bullding).

Through the next couple of millennia – as with everything else – the written language of course evolved considerably, until we arrived at the word we all know today as Building.

So, there you have it.

JJJ