ABSTRACT
The history of architecture is the history of the human quest for habitation: as complex as humanity was to become, it began before the author had found himself in sapience, when woman, unable any longer to bear clinging offspring on extensive foraging expeditions, sat down at base and sent her man out alone, better, in co-operation with other males. As an enduring unit, distinguishing social man from other animals, the family was in the future but this was its beginning and the hearth-centred cave was its preferred home until it could devise and build an alternative. In the beginning, hides would doubtless have provided the tent's 'skin' over light timber 'bones', the zoomorphic analogy is irrelevant. Throughout his 'Stone Age' man continued as a nomadic hunter and gatherer: at its beginning he and his fellows were doubtless already camping in tents, though traces of numerous clustered tents, implying tribal organization, have been recovered only from the end of the Palaeolithic era.
