Since mechanical locks weren't perfected until the 1800
Can you provide a source and maybe specifics for this piece of trivia? As pointed out in the thread linked by /u/lingben, locks have been around for quite some time, especially for those who had valubles and the means to afford appropriate protection.
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have you searched here for previous similar questions? just a cursory look and see found this:
there may be other, more in depth and useful discussions
One way was certainly guard dogs.
Places like the Met have ceramics of intimidating Molosser (Mastiff) type dogs dating from 2000-1700 BCE. This dog looks quite similar to the modern Molosser (Mastiff) type breeds.
There is also the rather famous Cave Canum (Beware of Dog) mosaic buried under the ash in Pompeii in early CE.
So we are easily looking at thousands of years of big, scary looking dogs that would either deter robbers from trying or ensure intruders would be caught and trapped for the groundskeeper to find and deal with or potentially immediately maimed in the process.
There are a huge array of breeds of dogs designed to alert to, corner/keep, or outright attack strangers (often different breeds served each function). Many countries have variations on the theme (English Mastiff, French Mastiff, Neapolitan Mastiff, etc), but the basic ideas were the same. Purebred dogs are really fascinating bits of human history, as the working breeds who showed up over the years run in tandem with the needs of those people. This includes the fairly recent development of true "companion" breeds, which only came to be when the wealthy had time and money and food to spend on something that didn't provide them with time, income, or food in return.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3l7hqg/how_did_folks_from_ancient_civilization_lock/
We had a good thread on a similar subject last month, you might be interested in reading it!
Mostly this question is just wrongly premised, in two ways.
Firstly, until industrial times most people would have lived in small communities where everyone knew one another, only a minority of people lived in cities and they were not as densely populated as we know cities today. People would have known their neighbors, they wouldn't have been concerned about random strangers being able to come into their homes.
Secondly, most homes would have been nearly continuously occupied. Homes would have housed extended families or multiple families and there would be activity in them and around them nearly constantly. Cooking and a variety of crafts would have taken place in the home nearly every day. In pre-industrial societies there is always work to do because you don't simply go to a store to buy your clothes, candles, food, tools, etc, you make such things for yourself for the most part.
The modern norm of a small number of people living in a home and working far away during the day, leaving an unoccupied home in a city full of strangers came about through industrialization. So leaving a home locked was simply while people were away was simply not a concern for most people back then because it wasn't a thing that happened much. For the people who it was a concern for there were some types of locks, but mostly those people would have just hired guards or had workers or slaves who would have been around while they themselves were away.
That said, there were locks even going back to the time of ancient Egypt. But because of their expense and rarity the use of locks was restricted to the elite until they started to become easier to manufacture during medieval times.