Nomads are communities without fixed habitation who regularly move to and from areas. Such groups include hunter-gatherers, pastoral nomads, tinkers and trader nomads. In the twentieth century, the population of nomadic pastoral tribes slowly decreased, reaching an estimated 30–40 million nomads in the world as of 1995.
A painting by Vincent van Gogh depicting a caravan of nomadic Roma
Roma mother and child
Nomads on the Changtang, Ladakh
Rider in Mongolia, 2012. While nomadic life is less common in modern times, the horse remains a national symbol in Mongolia.
A hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living in a community, or according to an ancestrally derived lifestyle, in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local naturally occurring sources, especially edible wild plants but also insects, fungi, honey, bird eggs, or anything safe to eat, and/or by hunting game. This is a common practice among most vertebrates that are omnivores. Hunter-gatherer societies stand in contrast to the more sedentary agricultural societies, which rely mainly on cultivating crops and raising domesticated animals for food production, although the boundaries between the two ways of living are not completely distinct.
Pygmy hunter-gatherers in the Congo Basin in August 2014
The Mal'ta-Buret' people in the Baikal region of Siberia lived in dwellings built of mammoth bones, similar to those found in Upper Paleolithic Western Eurasia.
A San man in the Kalahari Desert in South Africa. Many San still live as hunter-gatherers.
Bison hunt under the wolf-skin mask, George Catlin, c. 1832
