Alter-Nomad: Hominization

Hominization is the process of how humans came to be. Since understanding travel is understanding what makes us human, the first step is to study our origins.

The Hominid species is born 20 million years ago. The Homo lineage from which we descend appeared 2 million years ago. That’s when we developed the concept of culture, unprecedented in the animal kingdom. Culture is what is not Nature. Early examples of culture are reflected not only by cave paintings and sculptures constituting a primitive form of art, but also by funeral rituals indicating a spiritual awareness. Ritualizing death is an attempt at controlling it.

Humans are animals driven to tame their environment. They domesticate fire. They give birth to languages to designate objects encountered while traveling or used in everyday life. This domestication of time and space enables us to evolve, not only as individuals but also as a species: the Homo Sapiens appears two hundred thousand years ago in Africa.

For over a million years, the different populations of hominids were all entirely nomad.

The act of moving, eased by bipedalism, was either compelled by an instinct to survive — to look for food or to run away from conflicts — or out of sheer curiosity, the lifetime of a human at the time being 20 years in average. With distance, communities and cultures evolve and become more diverse: human beings evolved by traveling.

The confrontation with foreign tribes leads people to exchange and barter. The market economy begins. Housing becomes more and more durable. Its inhabitants are protected from the hardships of the weather. Hunter-gatherers learn to grow vegetables and grains by diversifying their gene pools — agriculture. Nomads settling down to become farmers and shepherds, sedentarization started around 9000 years ago. Sedentism is thus an incredibly tiny fraction of our long history.

When sedentarization began, nomads were mainly divided into three categories: shepherds, traders, and migrants. Shepherds developed animal husbandry by selective breeding, making meat more nutritious. Traders contributed to the birth of arithmetic and the alphabet, as nomads are parts of a community to survive: understanding, speaking, and writing in a common language is essential. They invent music and art to satisfy their senses and entertain their hosts. Traders establish colonies during their travels. That’s for example how the city-state of Athens came to be: the merchant seamen invented democracy to prevent landowners (sedentary) from acquiring all the political power, the voting system allowing them to stay involved in the decision making process. On the other hand, the concept of currency is introduced to replace bartering by simplifying and normalizing trade. Finally, migrants gave birth to the first monotheistic Religions, with the ancient testament being the Hebraic narrative of the quest for the Promised Land.

Sciences, humanities, technologies, religions, arts… all those cultural elements form the basis of our civilization and originate from nomadic needs. A nomad shapes his body and mind through incessant movement: ultimately, the nomad is the father of the man. Mankind is born nomad.