Notable FEATURES of the NOMADS

The origin of the human being we can find it in the nomadic life, being the stage of history in which humans roamed the world without having a land of their own, being impossible for the people of that time to understand the concept of city or town. To understand what life was like for our ancestors in this article by a PROFESSOR we are going to talk about the characteristics of nomads.

Index

1. The origins of the nomads
2. Characteristics of the life of nomads
3. Evolution to sedentary lifestyle and current nomads

Before getting to know the characteristics of the nomads, we are going to discover the origin of this people. The origin of the nomads, that is, those people who moved from one place to another without having a fixed place of residence, we can find it in the first human groups, who went from cave to cave moving depending on the weather or lack of resources.

The stage that we usually associate with nomads is the Prehistory

In Prehistory the constant movement of the human being made all the continents inhabited, since a person could start his life in Europe and end up in Asia, always looking for food, climatic changes or problems such as extinction or fighting between groups humans.

The number of centuries in which during Prehistory the human being was nomadic means that in general computation we humans have been during nomads longer than sedentary, there are still several cases of nomads around the planet today.

To continue this lesson on the main characteristics of nomads we must explain how nomads lived, talking about different aspects of the life of these people of the world and understanding how they were able to survive in constant movement.

Feeding

The nomadic lifestyle was that of hunter-gatherer, being impossible for them to have agriculture or livestock due to the nomadic nature of their lifestyle. Due to their activities, their diet was based on meat, fruit and other foods that could collect as vegetables or animal eggs, being when there was no food left in a region that they moved to another.

Traditions

Much of the daily life of the nomads was based on their role as hunter-gatherer, although they also carried out other activities such as weapon creation wave manufacture of paints. Undoubtedly one of the great customs of the nomads was painting and other artistic representations, being something that we can find in numerous caves that they inhabited during their travels.

Society

The family concept For the nomads it was very broad, since they were considered as large groups of people and they were not just the concept we currently have of people from the same blood. It was where this stage was born that the first examples of social classes, since the situation of a person within the family depended on their function and gender.

Language

In the time of the prehistoric nomads there was no type of language, since it was born in large groups and more civilized cultures, being difficult to have a language for groups that hardly relate to each other. The way of communication of the nomads was based on the use of hands, gestures and sounds related to the objects they made reference to.

Habitat

The nomads' habitual residence was the open air or caves, the second were more loved, since they protect from the cold, while in the first the nomads had to use the skins of the animals to cover themselves. On rare occasions humans used branches and other elements to create small houses to live in during their travels.

Little by little the nomads ceased to be the main inhabitants of the world, initiating a change of human society towards sedentary lifestyle. They began to stay in one area for their entire lives and it did not depend on movement between places. One of the main causes of the appearance of sedentary lifestyle was the appearance of Agriculture, Livestock and fishing, being new forms of life that allowed to live in one place, this being over time the origin of the towns, cities and therefore the great civilizations of history.

The transition from nomadism to sedentary lifestyle is considered as one of the biggest changes of the history of mankind, being a fact that changed the human being forever, helping the origin of civilizationsand peoples that form the history of humanity thanks to the beginning of writing.

Nomadic peoples today

Although when thinking about nomads we usually focus on the prehistoric, the reality is that throughout history there have been many nomadic peoples and even today there are various peoples who maintain this way of life instead of sedentary lifestyle.

Some examples of current nomadic peoples are the Ghilji and the Eskimos, being at present very related the concept of nomad with that of shepherd, being the great majority of current nomadic peoples servants of shepherding.

When talking about historical nomadic peoples we must speak about the peoples of the mongolian steppe, with powerful peoples such as the Huns or the Mongols, who began their life in one place and ended much further away due to their nomadism based on war and conquest.

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