SOME HUMAN HABITATIONS 



By Collier Cobb 



Professor of Geology in the University of North Carolina 



A CHICAGO reviewer of my article 

 on the work of wind along the 

 North Carolina coast* pointed 

 out that the traveler need not now go to 

 Holland to see windmills, or to China to 

 see wind-driven carts, or to Turkestan 

 to see sand-buried cities. It is equally 

 true that he may review the records of 

 the past and examine into the arts of a 

 remote antiquity without leaving his own 

 land, without departing from his own 

 coasts, if he is so fortunate as to be a 

 dweller in the United States. 



He need not go to Switzerland and 

 study lake dredging to find how human 

 habitations were once built upon piles 

 by a race of dwarfs who wished to pro- 

 tect themselves from the dangers of the 

 land and lazily gain a livelihood by fish- 

 ing from their very doors. Nor need he 

 seek the submerged remains of such 

 dwellings in the lakes of Sweden, Italy, 

 and Ireland. 



Neither is it necessary for him to look 

 to far-away Australia in the very recent 

 past for the home of the bushman, which 

 is hardly more than a nest in a hollow 

 under a bush ; nor to Central Africa for 

 a half-concealed hut, such as a Batwa 

 pygmy builds for himself of palm leaves. 

 A journey of one thousand miles up the 

 Nile from Khartum is not necessary in 

 order to find the hemispherical hut made 

 or straw-thatch or of carefully woven 

 rushes, that home of so many of the sav- 

 age descendants of primeval man ; nor 

 need the traveler visit tropical Asia, or 

 the Malay peninsula, or the East Indies 

 to accomplish this purpose. The highest 

 type of straw-thatched gabled house, such 

 as is used by the Kaffirs of Natal, may be 

 found far short of the East Coast of 

 Africa ; nor is it necessary to visit our 



* Published in the National Geographic 

 Magazine June, 1906. 



new possessions in the Pacific to find 

 such a biding place for man. 



Our American Indian still makes for 

 himself a tepee from blankets of his 

 own weaving, and the American of the 

 Far North is sheltered through the long 

 day by a somewhat similar tent covered 

 with the skins of animals, though he 

 burrows in the ground through the long 

 winter night. These American tepees 

 are not unlike the tent of camel's-hair or 

 goat's-hair cloth that protects the Arab 

 from the heat of the desert. 



The Gaddanes of Luzon dwell in straw 

 houses built in tree tops, and even the 

 dwellers of King's Island spend their 

 summers in cliff houses perched high 

 upon poles. But the traveler needs not 

 to visit our island wards, the aborigines 

 of the West, or the Esquimaux and 

 Aleuts of Alaska to find even these prim- 

 itive dwellings. 



AJ1 of these early types of human habi- 

 tations may be seen strewn along our own 

 coast from Cape Hatteras to Cape Sable, 

 though they are of more common occur- 

 rence along the North Carolina coast than 

 elsewhere. These are by no means the 

 homes of half-savage men, but are the 

 temporary abodes of modern civilized 

 men, native to our own shores, when they 

 engage in the half-savage occupations of 

 fishing and hunting. 



They are thus not survivals, but atav- 

 isms. Modern man finds himself in a 

 situation practically identical with that 

 of his savage ancestors, and he meets 

 the conditions of existence in essentially 

 the same way as the savage. Man, after 

 all, is largely a creature of instinct, and 

 the small boy of our day is not alone in 

 his instinct of savagery. All of us like 

 to return at some season of each year to 

 the habit and garb of our primitive ances- 

 tors. With many of our dwellers by the 



