How Nomads Changed the World — with Anthony Sattin and Faisal Al Yafai

For thousands of years, most humans were nomads, living their lives on the move. They were raiders and traders, herder and hunters — and conquerors. From Genghis Khan to Osman I, nomads changed the course of history on countless occasions. And yet, says historian and travel writer Anthony Sattin, we still tend to underestimate their influence on history. “Our histories glorify people who build monuments,” he tells New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai. “We don’t tend to value tribes in the Amazon, for instance, who didn’t chop down their forests, who maintained an equilibrium and flourished without disturbing the ecological balance in their world.” Plenty of nomad cultures have been literate, but on the whole, most of the societies keeping substantial written records were sedentary societies. Traditionally confined by historians to anecdotes and afterthoughts, oral histories recently have been recognized as just as useful as written histories for reconstructing the past. “The stories are still being told, but the research hasn’t been done,” says Sattin. Those past biases come at a huge cost to our understanding of history, Sattin says: “I don’t think we can know who we’re going to become unless we know who we were, and half of our story is missing, because for most human history nomads have been half of our story, and yet they’re not in our books.” Produced by Joshua Martin and Christin El-Kholy