In the early times of human history, humanity lived by nomadic life. Over time, we learned how to farm and raise domesticated animals. We started to settle down in permanent places, and many groups of people formed tribes. Over time, many tribes were formed into states or countries as we have many countries today. Many people live in developed countries where nomadic life was extinct, they may not know traditional nomads are still practicing in many areas in the world. Many people who rarely watch the news around the world, assume that nomadic life is something in the past. In reality, many people live in Central Asian countries, African countries, and undeveloped countries, and they still live nomad lifestyles. According to some estimations, there are around 35 million people live traditional nomadic lives today.
There are two traditional nomadic lifestyles such as hunting and gathering nomad, pastoral nomad. What is the definition of a nomadic lifestyle? The nomad lifestyle is a lifestyle in which people live without fixed habitation, and regularly move from one place to another place to find food. In nomadic hunting and gathering, people move from one place to another place (campsite to campsite) based on available wild plants and animals. This is the oldest of human lifestyles in human history. There are only a few tribes to continue to live foraging in Amazon forests or somewhere in Africa.
San people in Botswana, they still live the hunting and gathering lifestyle
The first pastoral nomadic society developed in period from 8500 to 6500 BCE. Pastoral nomad is a lifestyle in which people move from one place to another place to find good pastures for their livestock. Pastoral nomads is the best way to exploit the infertile areas where they live. For example, nomad people just move to new grassland, and they live there until their animals ( cow, goat, horse, etc.) graze all the grasses on the land. Then they start to move to find new pastures for their livestock while they let their previous land recover. A long time ago, nomad people traveled by animal or foot. Now many nomad people travel by motor vehicle.
This is a camsite of Mongolian nomads.
The majority of nomad people travel in groups of families or bands, these groups are based on kinship or family ties or formal agreement of cooperation. Nowaday, nomads only travel within their country borders, they do businesses with outsiders like other people. They apply technologies to improve productivity and standar of living. Many children of nomads, they attend schools like other settlement children. So in the next few generations, nomadic lifestyles will be gone.
Traditional nomad lifestyles will be gone, but another nomadic lifestyle is developing, it is called digital nomad. DIgital nomad is different completely to traditional nomad. In digital nomad, people make a living through their smart devices such as computer, cellphone. They can live whereever they want, they can enjoy working and traveling as the same time. There is around 35 million digital nomads worldwide. This number is expected to inscrease in the next decades.