468 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 64 



Let us now look at an older and larger pattern of animal domesti- 

 cation which has profoundly influenced the characteristics of flora 

 and fauna over a vast area of the land surface of the Old World. The 

 development of the highly specialized husbandry known as nomadism 

 is far from primitive, though because it shows so many examples of 

 arrested cultural growth we are apt so to consider it. Nomadic pas- 

 toralism is one of the surest means of breaking ecological climaxes. 

 It is an insidious means also. There is not the primary traumatic 

 onslaught of tree- felling, brush-grubbing, and ploughing that agri- 

 culture demands. Pastoralism is a penetration of terrain by a rela- 

 tively small number of human beings. The landscape is not altered 

 immediately and there are no considerable works of man evident to 

 the eye. But numbers of grazing animals and close treading place 

 selective pressures on the vegetational complex. Where fire is used, 

 selection is more rapid. In effect, the herbage complex is simplified, 

 and that means gaps in the original niche structure, with consequent 

 overall loss in biological efficiency of the community. Broadly, the 

 vegetation moves toward the xeric. 



Nomadism postdates agriculture by an undetermined period running 

 to some thousands of years. The specialization is like that of the 

 seafaring man, no longer content to paddle about in the shallows with 

 primitive raft or formless dug-out canoe, who has built himself a 

 ship, beautiful in form because it is functional in crossing uncharted 

 seas of uncertain temper, and who has developed the skill to navigate 

 by the stars and sail the ship as if it were a live thing. Equally, the 

 nomad did not just walk out into the sea of the steppe which stretches 

 from the Crimea of Europe to the Yellow Kiver of China : he was a 

 riverside dweller, a forest-edge dweller venturing no farther than his 

 domesticated animals could go and come in a day, or perhaps a little 

 farther in the season of rains. Domestication itself probably arose 

 on religious grounds, for the animals in sight, touchable and ready 

 for sacrifice, were the embodiment of that which was desired, life- 

 giving and life-enhancing. One of the characteristics of nomad stock 

 is the capacity to herd close, and to move and feed and rest as one, a 

 matter for selection conscious and unconscious, before man could go 

 forth with flocks and herds on to the ocean of the steppe. 



The sheep is the mainstay of nomadism just as it is the mainstay 

 of the husbandry of wild lands today. The goat provides brains for 

 the most part. The multiplicity of mouths are wealth-gatherers ac- 

 tivated by four times as many superbly adapted legs and feet. Water 

 is needed in minimal quantities, and the animal itself provides man 

 with milk, meat, and warmth. But the nomad, interposing animals 

 between himself and tlie generally inhospitable environment of the 

 steppe, realized quite well that the several sorts of domesticated ani- 

 mals gave him different securities and desirable ends in an environ- 



