Author Topic: Website: Modern Nomadic Man  (Read 5248 times)

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Offline zeno

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Website: Modern Nomadic Man
« on: November 28, 2011, 01:09:17 am »
I found a website called Vagabond Journey about a man who practices perpetual travel, similar to nomads but in a modern context.

The author travels to Göbekli Tepe, a sanctuary built in southeastern Turkey just north of the Syrian border. He travels to Göbekli Tepe in order to learn more about the transition of man from nomads to sedentary citizens. Göbekli Tepe is hypothesized as the birthplace of agriculture and civilization (or at least one of them). Most believe agriculture to have arisen to procure food, but the head archaeologist, Klaus Schmidt, suggests that alcohol could have been the reason behind the advent of agriculture and eventually civilization:

“You can use it [grain] for food, and you can also use it for beer,” he explained. “There are now ideas that the beginning of cereal domestication was not so much in connection with bread and with food, but with beer making, for brewing. It is easy to do it, it is not like our beer, all you need is water and if let to stand in some container it will start to produce alcohol. So maybe it was beer making at the beginning.”

The authors conclusion to the article:

"The people who built and worshiped at Göbekli Tepe were initially nomadic hunters who knew neither grain nor how to sow it, but they began to change the world around them, and eventually set the stage for the infectious spread of civilization over the planet. In a period spanning roughly a thousand years, the mechanisms where put in place through which the plains and plateaus that surround Göbekli Tepe were transformed from forest to field. I went to Göbekli Tepe, stood on the mound and looked out across an expanse that was once a lush forest full of game, herbs, shrubs, and sustenance for hunter-gatherers. That same expanse is now looks beat, having been set upon for thousands of years by goat, sheep, and plow. A lone tree sits on top of Göbekli Tepe, seemingly reminding us of a lost era in human history, a lost sense of innocence before man moved on to control the ebbs and flows of nature, of a time before my species laid down their satchels and spears and picked up hoes and plows.

The modern human is not completely the same animal as was our migratory hunter-gatherer ancestors, and I soon realized that my search for my species’ lost nomadic roots just lead me into a study of people who had a physical and mental makeup that was slightly different than my own. I am the product of 10,000 years of super charged genetic adaption which was suppose to equip me to be a part of a sedentary, agricultural, civilized society. My biology is that of Cain the farmer not Abel the nomad, but I know that the restlessness of the nomad still lives inside of the modern human, as the wolf still lives inside of every dog."

 

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