Sedentary lifestyle is a very recent invention.
And it is not just about the habit of sitting on the sofa to watch the World Cup in Qatar, but about always living in the same place instead of moving with the seasons in search of the most favorable territories.
Mankind began to build cities and settle about 10,000 years ago, in the Neolithic, when agriculture was invented.
If you think that modern humans were born in Africa at least 200,000 years ago, that is a very short period.
Nomads still live in some corners of the world, although they are increasingly threatened.
But we are not at all certain that there is no going back and we are not all starting to move again.
And I'm not just talking about digital nomads or Frances McDormand's character in
Nomadland,
but to great migrations like those that forged the world during the Middle Ages.
Three recently published books—two in English and one in French—believe that a return to nomadism may be triggered by a phenomenon that is changing the face of the earth much faster than scientists expected: the climate emergency.
It is
Homo migrans.
De la sortie d'Afrique au Grand Confinement
(Payot), by Jean-Paul Demoule;
Nomad Century
(Allen Lane) by Gaia Vince and
Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World
(John Murray) by Anthony Sattin.
More information
Neolithic: this was a real revolution
It is very interesting that three essays by very different authors —a Neolithic scientist, an environmental journalist and a travel reporter— come to a similar conclusion: it is migrations that have made humanity what it is —talk about countries pure as the ultra-right does, is not only racist, but absurd and contrary to the data provided by history: every society is diverse and mixed.
They also share the certainty that we will get going again, not just from the poor south to the rich north, but from everywhere.
Gaia Vince's thesis, which has achieved great impact with
The Nomadic Century,
described by the essayist Andrea Wulf as "essential reading", is that it is about something that is going to affect us all.
“The coming migration will be large and diverse,” Vince writes.
“It will include the poorest fleeing heat waves and failed crops.
But it will also include those with education, the middle classes, people who can no longer live where they used to live because it is impossible to get a mortgage or home insurance, because their neighborhood has become uninhabitable because those with means have already gone to other places."
In fact, the author confesses that she herself has
googled
land prices in New Zealand and Canada “in search of a safe place for the next decades”.
Nomadic caravan in Algeria crossing the Sahara.Bettmann (Bettmann Archive)
Sattin, in
Nomads.
The wanderers who created our world
, and Demoule, in
Homo migrans.
From the departure of Africa to the Great Confinement,
they maintain that humanity was forged with its eternal movement, that the past and the present cannot be understood without thinking that all humans are fundamentally nomadic.
“No group, no society, constitutes a timeless entity that is perpetuated through the centuries, the most diverse population currents have passed through all the territories”, writes Demoule, a professor at the Sorbonne.
Sattin has a specific goal with his book: to study nomadic societies throughout history to see what we can learn from them "in a world that is failing."
Nomads leave a minimal climatic footprint and, above all, it is their movements that explain humanity, not the barriers erected to prevent them.
Vince writes: "The migrations will save us, because it is the migrations that have made us what we are."
Perhaps it is true and the hope of humanity is to learn to live on the road again.
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