I saw an excellent documentary on Aborigines and their ramblings---which the doc explained was often to escape others living too near them. I'd love to watch it again but can't recall the title. A friend worked with them years ago while she was working in a university (think near Melbourne) where she'd go into the field and tried to set up a library (!) for the Aborigines (I'd always thought their communication was without writings. It sounded fascinating and she did it for about 3 years. She always takes on unbelievable tasks, that tend to be fascinating.
Justin, I look forward to the book. Have you ever wondered if members of more nomadic Native American tribes were happier than members of less nomadic tribes? Or, in more general terms, all other things being equal, is the hunter following the game happier than the farmer tending the crops?
Happiness is always difficult to gauge, especially when looking into the past. I would say the picture is fairly complex, and farming and being nomadic weren't mutually exclusive in many cases. There was a lot of variation across cultures as to how mobile they were (even amongst mobile groups, some moved once a year, some moved 50 times a year). An important North American archaeologist, Robert L. Kelly, aptly termed this "the foraging spectrum." Also, some groups who had once been farmers shifted back to hunting and gathering, and vice versa. And, like the Vikings, for instance, they explored, in part, to obtain better farmland so that they could settle...and raid, of course lol. Some groups had unique and favorable ecologies that allowed them to be almost entirely settled, like the Pacific NW tribes with their plentiful salmon runs.
A lot of what motivated different groups to move before agriculture were things like decreasing food supply in a given ecological niche, the longer you were in a given area (see marginal value theorem on foraging), or that an encampment was becoming degraded by food and human waste, thus attracting vermin and pesky insects that could make people ill.
So there were a lot of quotidian reasons people were moving as well, and "wandering" wasn't necessarily just due to this urge I'm talking about. However, I suspect it was still an important conscious source of excitement that played into the rituals and cycles of annual movement for a lot of groups, especially when population densities were far lower and no one had a conceptual map of a finite earth in their head. The land and sea were limitless in most people's minds for most of human history. Many groups also practiced annual ceremonies that they would travel large distances to meet up with other members of their clans or tribes for a variety of reasons, e.g., trade, marriages, and forming alliances. Movement across the landscape was likely a natural rhythm of annual human experience.
I think there is a fair amount of historic literature out there as well, of natives lamenting the coercion to adopt the model of Euro-American settlement and farming practices and looking to their ancestors' past with nostalgia for the days of a more nomadic way of life. To me, any society that inhibits the liberty to move is undermining a lot of human potential, happiness probably being just one of many factors.
I think it’s Curiosity that drives us. A very important trait that has an important influence on our behavior, including invention as well as travel. It’s a gene, or trait, that is NOT universal!
I saw an excellent documentary on Aborigines and their ramblings---which the doc explained was often to escape others living too near them. I'd love to watch it again but can't recall the title. A friend worked with them years ago while she was working in a university (think near Melbourne) where she'd go into the field and tried to set up a library (!) for the Aborigines (I'd always thought their communication was without writings. It sounded fascinating and she did it for about 3 years. She always takes on unbelievable tasks, that tend to be fascinating.
Justin, I look forward to the book. Have you ever wondered if members of more nomadic Native American tribes were happier than members of less nomadic tribes? Or, in more general terms, all other things being equal, is the hunter following the game happier than the farmer tending the crops?
Happiness is always difficult to gauge, especially when looking into the past. I would say the picture is fairly complex, and farming and being nomadic weren't mutually exclusive in many cases. There was a lot of variation across cultures as to how mobile they were (even amongst mobile groups, some moved once a year, some moved 50 times a year). An important North American archaeologist, Robert L. Kelly, aptly termed this "the foraging spectrum." Also, some groups who had once been farmers shifted back to hunting and gathering, and vice versa. And, like the Vikings, for instance, they explored, in part, to obtain better farmland so that they could settle...and raid, of course lol. Some groups had unique and favorable ecologies that allowed them to be almost entirely settled, like the Pacific NW tribes with their plentiful salmon runs.
A lot of what motivated different groups to move before agriculture were things like decreasing food supply in a given ecological niche, the longer you were in a given area (see marginal value theorem on foraging), or that an encampment was becoming degraded by food and human waste, thus attracting vermin and pesky insects that could make people ill.
So there were a lot of quotidian reasons people were moving as well, and "wandering" wasn't necessarily just due to this urge I'm talking about. However, I suspect it was still an important conscious source of excitement that played into the rituals and cycles of annual movement for a lot of groups, especially when population densities were far lower and no one had a conceptual map of a finite earth in their head. The land and sea were limitless in most people's minds for most of human history. Many groups also practiced annual ceremonies that they would travel large distances to meet up with other members of their clans or tribes for a variety of reasons, e.g., trade, marriages, and forming alliances. Movement across the landscape was likely a natural rhythm of annual human experience.
I think there is a fair amount of historic literature out there as well, of natives lamenting the coercion to adopt the model of Euro-American settlement and farming practices and looking to their ancestors' past with nostalgia for the days of a more nomadic way of life. To me, any society that inhibits the liberty to move is undermining a lot of human potential, happiness probably being just one of many factors.
I think it’s Curiosity that drives us. A very important trait that has an important influence on our behavior, including invention as well as travel. It’s a gene, or trait, that is NOT universal!