Verticality, Part IV: Beating the System

Man becomes the first animal to escape the food chain

This chapter is part of a series that compose the main verticality narrative. The full series is located here.

Monkeys and apes are vulnerable creatures. Our source code was built for a life in the trees, and on our own we lack any natural means of defending ourselves. Compared to other animals that evolved to survive on the savannah, we have no claws or fangs, we’re not particularly quick, and we don’t have natural camouflage.[1] As Yuval Noah Harari stated in Sapiens, humans were the ‘underdogs of the savannah’ due to our size and lack of natural defenses.[2] This makes us dangerously vulnerable to predators, and meant we needed to find another evolutionary niche in order to survive. Our answer was power in numbers.

We began our surface-based existence in small hunter-gatherer groups that were nomadic in nature. These tribes lived and died based on the strength of their social relationships and their ability to work together as a group. As a result, much of our evolutionary baggage is designed to function in small tribes with strong social relationships among individuals.[3] This is well-worn territory in the animal kingdom. Many prey animals such as zebra or meerkats exist in groups or herds in order to better defend against predators, and many predators such as wild dogs or lions attack in groups or packs to maximize the chances of a successful hunt.

Our tribal tendencies gave us the edge we needed to compete and survive on the savannah. Over time we would continue to progress and evolve to the point where we escaped the food chain and colonized the globe. Once we were freed up from the day-to-day survival of our lives on the savannah, we would be able to focus our efforts on escaping the surface through verticality. There were four major developments along this path, and we’ll touch on each in the following sections. They are the Cognitive Revolution, the domestication of fire, the Agricultural Revolution and the Primitive Hut. Each of these had unique effects on our day-to-day lives, and each allowed us a distinct advantage over our competition on the savannah.

Cognitive Revolution

One major change between Homo sapiens and our more distant ancestors is the size of our brain. Throughout the past few million years the human brain has more than doubled in size, and we’re still unclear as to what precipitated this growth.[4] This process seems to have begun with Homo habilis, who lived in Africa between 2.4 and 1.4 million years ago, and continued with Homo erectus, who appeared 1.7-1.8 million years ago, until modern humans appeared around 300,000 years ago.[5] As to why this happened, that’s quite difficult to answer, but we do understand what types of advantages this gave us over our competitors.

A larger brain brought both benefits and costs to life on the savannah. On the one hand, it allowed us to conceptualize things that were previously impossible. These included an enhanced spatial sense, intuitive physics, the capacity for language and the ability to communicate abstract ideas.[6] These last two would prove to be the most profound, and greatly enhanced our ability to work together as a group.

Our capacity for language allows us to communicate abstract ideas to each other, and paved the way for religious belief systems to take hold on our cultures. Think of it like this: before abstract thinking was possible, all we could communicate was what we saw in front of us. There’s a mammoth over there! Look out, a lion! These are simple statements that only rely on our sensory inputs, and there are many other animals who communicate such things. Once we were able to understand abstract thoughts and patterns, we could conceptualize things that weren’t directly from our senses. The benefits here were twofold: first, we could coordinate future events such as hunts or religious ceremonies, we could plan out the best settlement locations, or anticipate where predators will be. Second, we could begin inventing stories about things we didn’t understand, and act in accordance with what we believed would bring us good fortune. We could also begin to look to the sky and conceptualize ideas about the sky and the underground, which would dominate our early experiences with religion.

The costs of a larger brain affected us as well. One main setback is our large brain-case, or skull, which makes childbirth very difficult. This means human infants need to be born much earlier in their development than most other mammals, so the head can fit through the birth canal. As a result, our young are much more vulnerable and require more work in order to raise them. Another cost of a larger brain is the energy it requires to function. This means we had to find more efficient ways to hunt and prepare our food so we had enough energy to think with our larger brains.

Domestication of Fire

Another major development that facilitated our growing brains was the domestication of fire. This was a gradual process, and we have evidence that our ancestors made use of fire as early as 800,000 years ago. It wasn’t until around 300,000 years ago that we had mastered fire and used it on a daily basis, however. The benefits were vast and far-reaching. We had a reliable source of warmth and light, a powerful weapon against predators and, most importantly, the means to cook our food. Cooking allowed us to more easily digest foods, such as wheat, rice and potatoes. Cooking also kills germs and parasites that could be lurking in our food. Lastly, eating cooked food requires much less chewing, which frees up time and energy for other needs to be met.[7]

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House from 1910, main floor plan. You can see the centrally located fireplace, or hearth, around which the rest of the plan is designed. Wright believed the hearth should be the central element of the home, as a place where gathering occurs.

As a result of its utility, humans have a deep connection to fire, and ever since we mastered its ways, fire has been a locus around which we gather and socialize.[8] This is most likely a direct effect of the benefits described above. Even today, people still gather around campfires, fire pits or the domestic hearth in order to eat and socialize together. Modern architect Frank Lloyd Wright believed this, and went so far as to design his homes around a centralized hearth, symbolizing the power of gathering that fire has on us.

Agricultural Revolution

Life was getting better for our ancestors. We had mastered the use of fire and our brains were growing bigger. Our next major development was to ditch the nomadic way of life in favor of more permanent settlements. At the time, we would pick up and move our settlements when food resources dwindled or when predators moved in. We did occasionally create a permanent fishing village, but this was the exception to the rule.[9] It wasn’t until we began to experiment with agriculture and animal domestication that permanent settlements would become commonplace for our species.[10] With agriculture and animal domestication, we no longer needed to be hunter-gatherers. The gathering was replaced by gardening and the hunting was replaced by herding.[11] Not all of us made this switch, however, and the dwindling numbers of nomadic people still living today are a testament to the benefits that a stationary lifestyle brought to our species.[12]

Permanent settlements had profound effects on our day-to-day lives. We no longer needed to go searching for our food. We could settle in a single place and become villagers. In many ways, the Agricultural Revolution made civilization possible, since a city cannot develop with a nomadic lifestyle.[13] We now had much more control over our environment, and we had successfully escaped the natural food chain. With farming and animal domestication, we now had control over the plants and animals that would sustain us. As a result, we began concentrating at higher numbers than our hunter-gatherer lifestyles would allow. Permanent shelters and structures were now necessary. We began externalizing our need for shelter and our control over the surrounding environment. We could begin using verticality to escape the surface of the earth.

Primitive Hut

Our permanent settlements required permanent structures for shelter. This requirement forced us to externalize our needs onto the surrounding environment. We could no longer rely on found shelters such as caves in order to provide us with shelter and to support our daily lives. We would begin to use architecture to help us achieve verticality, and it would ultimately allow us to work toward satisfying our need to escape the surface.

The Primitive Hut, the frontispiece of Marc Antoine Laugier’s Essai sur l'architecture from 1755. He represents the first work of architecture as the first example of humanity externalizing our need for shelter, and our connection to our natural surroundings.

At its most basic level, the function of architecture is to provide us with shelter. We build in order to have control over our environment and to protect us from the sky. The Primitive Hut is a metaphor for our first act of building, and it represents the first act of externalizing our need for verticality. Marc Antoine Laugier included the Primitive Hut on the frontispiece of his Essai sur l'architecture from 1755 in order to make the connection between humanity and the natural environment. It’s a far-reaching idea, and as we’ll see it would dominate the world of architecture throughout history.

With the development of permanent settlements, two major threads would appear and provide the initial thrust for our subsequent struggles with verticality. The first is the need to defend ourselves from external threats, and the second is our relationship to God. Our attempts to satisfy each of these needs are where we turn our attention to next.

Keep reading: Verticality, Part V: Global Threads


[1]: Morris, Desmond. The Naked Ape: A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1967. 29.

[2]: Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2015. 13-14.

[3]: Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Viking Penguin, 2002. 220-221, 285.

[4]: Oppenheimer, Stephen. Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World. London: Constable, 2003. 13.

[5]: Devlin, Hannah. "Tracing the tangled tracks of humankind’s evolutionary journey." The Guardian, February 12, 2018.

[6]: Pinker, 220-221

[7]: Harari, 12-13; also Wright, Ronald. A Short History of Progress. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2004. 16

[8]: Semper, Gottfried. "The Four Elements of Architecture: A Contribution to the comparative Study of Architecture." In The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, 101-29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1851. 102.; Kostof, Spiro. A History of Architecture. Second ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1995. 21.; Harari 12-13.

[9]: Harari, 48

[10]: Harari, 77-83; Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999. 85.

[11]: Wright, Ronald. A Short History of Progress. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2004. 43.

[12]: Bronowski, J. The Ascent of Man. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973. 60.

[13]: ibid.