"Once upon a time there was a world where we were all hunters and gatherers." Already the initial line of Nómadas marks in its so-called First Act (“Balance”, on Eurasia, reaching the Middle Ages) the pattern of the essay both in the subject and in its approach. It is a work that, being a thesis, smells of adventure.
Although it is a historical chronicle, it is not an academic volume, as the author confirms in the preface. A well-documented work, which has materialized after many years of research and debate, is based on such a large bibliography that it includes even an unpublished work by Bruce Chatwin, in addition to being based on the vast experience in travel of the author, Anthony Sattin, a well-known British journalist. specialized in them.
The book also borrows chronological sequencing from the historical essay. Starting in prehistory, it continues with the ancient Anatolian site of Göbekli Tepe, from 9500 BC. C., and, after having examined different times with a magnifying glass, he arrives at the present. Until today where there is a global population of 7,800 million, with an urban population of 5,600 million compared to just 40 million nomads. In other words, little to do with those hunters and gatherers, and not necessarily for the better.
Nomads points to the latter with historical cases that challenge the traditional vision of cities as civilizing agents against marauding hordes of semi-savage nations. The author recalls, for example, that the nomadic people of the Xiongnu and the Scythians and their allies inhabited regions larger and more powerful than the Roman or Han empires.
This enhancement, completed by the acts "Empire" (from the Muslim emergence to the Mongolian decline) and "Restitution" (modernity), contemplates how they lived and thought and what societies such as the Hyksos, the Huns, the Huns, the the Mughals of India, the prairie tribes in America and the Australian aborigines.
With a multifactorial analysis that adds genetics, psychology or linguistics to history and archaeology, Sattin weaves a convincing evolutionary plot in which positive traits are appreciated, and useful today -he defends-, shared by successive wandering cultures. These signs, others less happy and the very presence of the nomads, hostile or cooperative, would have had an intense influence on contemporary sedentary civilizations, the author believes.
A more permeable and flexible collective mentality than in the hierarchical Sumerian Uruk and its later emulations would be counted among the virtues of the mobile peoples. Also a better integration with nature and with the rest of humanity than, for example, the colonial and industrialized States.
