Page 328 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

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and ornaments of wood and flint, and exchanging their seal­
skins for furs. And they exchanged news for news. For just as the

hunters of the arctic seas roamed hundreds of miles east and
west along the coasts, the hunters of the forest roamed hundreds
of miles north and south with the seasons.
At the winter end of this range the men of the forests met
the men of the Great Plains. In North America the plains people

were still hunters, small scattered groups following the great
game of the prairies on foot. But in Asia the men of the plains
herded—and now rode—horses, and possessed cattle in great

numbers. And they in their turn ranged widely with their herds,
as far as the mountains of the Chinese border and the plains of
Turkmenistan. And some distance into Europe. It was on these
borders of their range that they came into contact with farming
communities and there heard the news and met the commercial

travelers of the great citied nations farther still to the south.
It is these great concourses of peoples, plainsmen and
foresters and men of the coast and tundra, whose existence and
contact with each other we know of, but whose history we do not

know. While the way of life of each group of peoples may not
have been appreciably different in 1300 b.c. from what it was in
2000 b.c. or 1650 b.c., the individual men and women who made
up the groups undoubtedly experienced lifetimes full of the stuff

of history. Like the pre-Columbian Americans of a.d. 1300
(and for that matter the pre-Columbian Americans of 1300 b.c.)
the men of the plains and forests of Asia would be assembled in

nations, each with its own name and tribal entity, with its own
language and oral traditions. Nation would war with nation over
stolen hunting and grazing grounds, stolen cattle, and stolen
women. And nations would band together into confederacies,
under famous chiefs whose names and exploits would be sung

for centuries, but whose memory is now lost. The forest natives
would raid the cattle of the plainsmen, and the plains nations
would burn off the hunting grounds of the forest people. The
settled farmers of the south would build stockades and forts

against the grazing nations, and anxiously seek news of whether
the wandering herdsmen were disposed to peace or war.
But no nation was exclusive, and along the borders the peo-