The First Nomads

Where do you live? Where do you sleep? Do you sleep in the same bed every night, or do you move into a new house every week?

A long time ago—about seven thousand years in the past—families didn’t live in houses and shop at grocery stores.

Nomads gathered their food from the land around them. They ate plants that they picked, roots that they dug out of the ground, and nuts and berries that they gathered from bushes and trees. When they had eaten most of the food in one place, they would move on to another place. Women and children had the job of digging up roots, picking nuts, berries, and plants, and collecting other kinds of food—eggs, wild honey, and even lizards and snakes. Men hunted for meat with spears, bows and arrows. If the nomads camped near a river or lake, the men would fish too. When the nomads had hunted in one area for a while, all the animals would move away from them. When that happened, the nomads would pack up and follow the game.

In warm places, nomads built tents by stretching animal hides over wooden frames. They could take these tents with them when they moved. Nomads who lived in colder, rocky places used caves for shelter. We know that they lived there because they painted pictures of animals on the walls of the caves; we can still see these pictures today.

Tarak is a seven-year-old girl who lives with her family in the days of the nomads. She likes warm weather the best because she can sleep out in the open and look at the stars until she falls asleep.

One warm morning, Tarak gets up when the sun comes up. She is sleeping outside, so all she has to do is pick up the piece of animal skin she sleeps on and take it to her mother.

In the middle of the nomads’ camp, the fire is still burning from the night before. Tarak’s uncle and some of the other adults have taken turns staying up through the night, watching the fire and keeping it burning. They heard a wildcat screaming in the night and wanted to keep it away from the camp. Tarak’s uncle says that the wildcat has already frightened away the flocks of small deer that the hunters were tracking. There’s no meat for breakfast this morning. If the hunters don’t shoot any deer today, the whole group of nomads will pick up their tents and skins and begin to walk towards a new place to hunt.

Tarak doesn’t like the grain that her mother offers her for breakfast, so she decides to wait and eat when she goes out to gather food. Every morning, Tarak and her brothers go out with their mother to look for plants and berries. But they’ve been gathering food in the same place for a long time, and they’ve already picked most of the leaves that are good to eat. They’ve already scraped all the honey out of the wild bees’ nest that her younger brother found in the crack of a rock. And they’ve taken the eggs from all the nests that they can climb up to.

She and her younger brother get their game bags—small bags made out of skin—and start out to look for food. “I’m going to find another bees’ nest,” brags her brother. “Then we can eat honey again.”

“I’m the best lizard catcher in the family,” Tarak retorts. “I bet I can find a lizard before you can find a bees’ nest.”

Sure enough, as they walk out of a patch of woods into the sunshine, Tarak sees a lizard dart away into the crack of a log. She leaps on the log and turns it over. Three lizards try to scurry away from her, but in a moment, she has scooped them up and dumped them into her bag. There isn’t very much meat on a lizard, but her mother is a wonderful cook; she can stew the lizards in boiling water until every shred of meat has come off the bones, add herbs and roots, and serve a good filling stew to the whole camp. All the way back to the nomad camp, Tarak can feel the lizards squirming in her bag. It makes her hungry. She can’t wait to taste her mother’s lizard stew.