Let’s face it, moving is a pain in the neck. It’s exhausting to pack up boxes, leave behind possessions, and load them into a truck. Given the hassle, most people stay put in their houses for many years at a time.
Living in the same place is a relatively new human experience. For many thousands of years, people were nomadic. They often stayed in a place for mere hours before moving on.
Ultimately, most people gave up the nomadic lifestyle. Researchers are still learning about ancient wanderers and why people stopped being nomadic.
When Did People Stop Being Nomadic?
Scholars do not agree as to when people moved away from a hunter-gatherer nomadic lifestyle. It’s believed that people broadly stopped being nomadic around 12,000 years ago as farming became an option.
The end of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle didn’t happen all at once. In some parts of the world, it took thousands of years for people to learn how to cultivate various crops
What Is a Nomad?
The word nomad is rooted in the Greek word nomas, meaning to graze or pasture flocks. The term is associated with the past experience of moving along with herded animals, but it’s mainly used to describe any group of mobile people.
Pastoral Nomads
Ancient nomads were mobile for a variety of reasons, and their stationary times ranged from mere hours to entire seasons, depending on the resources they were seeking. Pastoral nomads, for example, raised and cared for herded animals. They moved based on access to grazing land and drinkable water for their herd. Pastoral people were semi-nomadic, and the group sometimes settled by a particular resource for several months at a time.
Hunter-gatherers
Hunter-gatherers had different motivations to move. They based their movement on access to food, water, and safe living conditions. If they found themselves conveniently near an animal’s seasonal migration route, they might have stayed the entire season. They could stay for years if they happened upon a lake teeming with fish and waterfowl.
Learn more: Nomads as Post-Hunter-gatherers
What Caused Nomadic People to Move Around?
We can understand why human communities settled and adapted using two distinct concepts: residential mobility and limited mobility.
Residential Mobility
Scientists use the term “residential mobility” to describe nomadic situations in which an entire group of people left all their possessions and walked to a new place.
The distance a group was able to travel was determined by various factors, such as the ability to cross terrain or the likelihood of area conflicts.
Limited Mobility
Groups with restrictions on how far they could travel or limitations on when they could travel experienced “limited mobility.” Limited mobility may have involved a snowy mountain pass that prevented a group from crossing during the colder months.
