Paleo Places - Chapter 3

Chapter 3:  Paleo People

The so-called Paleo period is key to understanding our reactions to environment for a couple major reasons.  First, we evolved into modern homo sapiens sapiens during this time, and secondly as you will see in Chapter 1, this thin veneer of civilization that you see around you aside, man has actually spent the vast, VAST majority of his time on Earth living in Paleo environments.

Modern Man, or homo sapiens sapiens, evolved on the African savannah around 200 thousand years ago.  The Agricultural Revolution that led to the widespread advent of the first towns and then cities happened about 10 thousand years ago.  These numbers – 200 thousand and 10 thousand are important…look at the ratio between the numbers – 20:1.  This ratio means that Man has spent almost twenty times as much of his existence as a hunter-gatherer as he has in towns and cities.  To look at it another way, Man has spent 95% of his time living is small bands – and then only the past 5% living in Agricultural, and very recently, Industrial cities.

Man evolved on the African savannah and his likes and dislikes and ways of doing things evolved there too.  Are we talking about instincts?  Not quite.  There are characteristics common to all groups – even isolated groups –  of humans.  Fire-making is one such characteristic.  Everyone all over the planet does it…but, you couldn’t really call fire-making an instinct.

In his book by the same name, Donald Brown calls these characteristics “Human Universals.”  I have included Brown’s list of Human Universals in the Appendix of this book.  It is fascinating.

Brown’s Human Universals are a great place for us to start our quest for, and understanding of, what humans really need and want in their built environments.

In subsequent chapters of this book we will be developing a running list of “Characteristics of Paleo Places.”  The aim of this chapter is to convey that Human Universals do exist, and that they do have Paleo roots.  Along the way, we are going to take up a detailed discussion of the human need for art, citing a book, “The Art Instinct”,” by Dennis Dutton.  But, for now, I want to share what he says about the Paleo roots of some of our societal characteristics in this quote from “The Art Instinct.”

“…the Pleistocene itself – the evolutionary theater in which we acquired the tastes, intellectual features, emotional dispositions, and personality traits that distinguish us from our hominid ancestors and make us what we are – was eighty thousand generations long.”

This last by Dutton, where he points out that this phase of our development lasted 80 thousand generations, re-emphasizes just what a long, important period of societal evolution we are discussing.

Another important source that will be cited throughout this book is Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate:  The Modern Denial of Human Nature.”  With reference to the Pleistocene/Paleo period, here is what he has to say, “These ways of knowing and core intuitions are suitable for the lifestyle of small groups of illiterate, stateless people who live off the land, survive by their wits, and depend on what they can carry.  Our ancestors left this lifestyle for a settled existence only a few millennia ago, too recently for evolution to have done much, if anything, to our brains.” 

The take away is that although we now live in modern settings, our reaction to these towns and cities is still Paleo.  We must deconstruct what will work in a built environment. We can do this by developing a list of “Characteristics of Paleo Places” and then making sure those characteristics are present in our modern towns and cities.