Evolutionarily speaking, only recently did humans start to exponentially grow their population worldwide, and even more recently, humans started to live in cities. But what actually drove such a shift in population growth and new ways of inhabiting the planet?
Tally sticks, intriguing bone artifacts with markings that can be dated to 70,000 years old, are today well known to be one of the first representations of astronomical cycles by humans, specifically the phases of the moon.
Early research into these tally sticks was long dominated by institutional bias. Many archaeologists and scientists—the vast majority of whom were men—framed them as abstract mathematical devices or commercial record-keeping tools, preferring to praise early humans as “pioneering mathematicians”.
However, the Tally sticks were a practical, life-centered necessity of period tracking for human reproduction purposes. At this point, it was probably not made as a contraception method but rather as a way to time-bound pregnancies, to know when the due date is expected. Considering the ease of spotting the presence, absence, and shape of the moon in the night sky, Tally sticks became a reliable clock to follow pregnancies.
As thousands of years unfolded, somewhere between 40,000 and 15,000 years ago, domestication happened, affecting humans and the other animal species involved in it, enabling human population growth in an unprecedented way. By observing domesticated plants and animals with their biologically imprinted yearly cycles of reproduction and maturation, humans began to gain insights into the solar year.
This curious “discovery” of the solar calendar (mainly in the northern hemisphere in the beginning, where the seasons are more evident) happened way before any evidence of astronomy beyond the tally sticks. Interestingly, even after the adoption of the solar calendar, humans continued to believe for a long time that Earth was the center of the universe.
For domesticated farming purposes, solar year tracking, a form of time tracking, became a necessity. In this way, dating around 12,000 years ago, monuments that work as calendars and astronomical clocks (such as Göbekli Tepe, Nabta Playa, Stonehenge, and so forth) started to appear worldwide to primarily keep track of the seasons, to track domesticated animal pregnancies, as well as to track the planting seasons (knowing the best time to plant and to harvest).
Constructing these monumental calendars required communities to organize, gather, and cooperate on an unprecedented scale, sometimes involving several generations. The spatial layout of those stone circles and pillar rings created the first public spaces engineered specifically to bring the group of humans together around a shared understanding of time. They are the precursors of the first cities.
Because these monuments were raised before written records existed, modern culture often wraps them in romantic mystery, and architecture scholars don’t even consider them architecture.
However, from a human evolutionary perspective, those monuments were, in reality, functional collective infrastructure.
As technologies advance and time tracking becomes portable, it is easy to dismiss the need for these structures for ancient humans. This allowed architecture to become something else, detached from a human evidence-based past, trying to become bigger than human existence itself.
But unequivocally, those monuments were the original civic nodes, a stage where humans gathered, cooperated, and celebrated their shared existence. Therefore, this is the science-bounded, evidence-based origin of architecture – a discipline whose main objective is to shelter and strengthen human relationships.
All references for this article can be found here.