The man began to build a home, a shelter for himself and his family, thousands and thousands of years ago. The kinds of homes people built long ago depended almost completely upon the climate in which they lived, the building materials that were close at hand, and the dangers they faced in their daily lives. So we cannot say such and such a "house" was the first ever built.
For example, when the stone axe was invented thousands of years ago, the wood began to play an important part in home-building. So the early man was already building himself houses of wood.
On the other hand, in ancient times, people living in warm climates found that grass houses were easy to make and comfortable to live in. So all over the wet, hot grasslands of Africa and on some of the islands of the South Pacific, houses were made of grasses, leaves, or vines that grew nearby.
Thousands of years ago people who lived in hot, dry climates found a way to make fine walls for their homes. They plastered a sticky mixture of clay or mud over house walls of loosely woven twigs. The mud plaster dried hard in the sun and stuck firmly to the house walls.
The ancient Egyptians are believed to have been among the first to discover how to make bricks. In Mesopotamia, primitive people later developed a way of making the sun-dried bricks harder and stronger. They placed the molded bricks in a hot fire and "burned" them. Later on, the ancient Assyrians found out how to burn a glaze onto their bricks. Such bricks have lasted for thousands of years.
