Short answers, pulled from the story.
A home, or domicile, is a space used as a permanent or semi-permanent residence for one or more human occupants, and sometimes companion animals. It provides sheltered spaces for domestic activity such as sleeping, preparing food, eating, and hygiene, as well as work and leisure.
The earliest homes humans inhabited were likely naturally occurring features such as caves. Evidence shows early human species inhabiting caves from at least one million years ago, including Homo erectus at Zhoukoudian in China and Homo rhodesiensis at the Cave of Hearths in South Africa.
A house is a single-unit residential building, while a home does not require a building, a distinction drawn by Joseph Rykwert. The word house is emotionally neutral, while home evokes personal, cognitive aspects, which is why the proverb says a house is not a home.
Mobile homes include house trailers, park homes, and trailer homes, which are prefabricated on a chassis and transported to site. Houseboats and traditional yurts or gers, portable round tents used by nomadic groups in the steppes of Central Asia, are also mobile forms of home.
According to Kirsten Gram-Hanssen, the strong link between the concept of home and the physical building is rooted in the Enlightenment of the seventeenth century. Before then, one's home was more public than private, and traits such as privacy, intimacy, and familiarity only later gained prominence.
Scholars have said the concept of home is dependent on homelessness, arguing that in a sense, without homelessness, we would not be concerned with what home means. Homelessness can result from disasters, eviction, foreclosure, insolvency, or fleeing violence as a refugee.
Gaston Bachelard and Martin Heidegger considered the bond between humans and dwelling an essential characteristic of humanity. A home can function as a symbol of the self, bound to the events of one's life, and Emmanuel Levinas described it as the place where a sense of self can be regained.