Locks - A New Approach to Locking Doors

A latch is just any mechanism for holding a door closed until you perform some operation to allow it to open. Once a door has a latch, basically any human can open and close the door because they've got problem solving skills and dexterous fingers. But the door cannot be opened by weather or by wild animals. And so we see examples of this in ancient greece and ancient china, from roughly the same time period, the first millennium.