Refuge

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Through eighty percent of the history of Homo sapiens, all human beings were hunters and gatherers. Of necessity, they were wanderers, for to stay in one place would mean gathering all there was of vegetable food and driving away all there was of animal food-and starvation would follow.

The only habitations such wanderers (or “nomads”) could have would have to be either parts of the environment, such as caves, or light and movable artifacts, such as tents.

Agriculture, however, came into being some ten thousand years ago and that introduced a great change.

Farms, unlike human beings and animals, are not mobile. The need to take care of farms and agricultural produce nailed the farmers to the ground. The more they grew dependent upon the harvest to maintain their swollen numbers (too great for most to survive if they had to return to hunting and gathering), the more hopelessly immobile they became. They could not run away, except for brief intervals, from wild animals, and they could not run away at all from nomadic raiders who wished to help themselves to the copious foodstores that they had not worked for.

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