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From a goat polo game known as Kok-Boru to 'intellectual games' played with a sheep's anklebones, these pictures show the traditional sports being played at the World Nomad Games. Ex-Soviet Kyrgyzstan kicked off the competition it has hosted biennially since 2014 on Monday with Turkey pledging to host the 2020 edition of the week-long traditional sport extravaganza. The picturesque Kyrchyn gorge near the shores of the Central Asian country's Lake Issyk-Kul was awash with colour as dancers and horse riders entertained international and local guests before the real action began on Tuesday.

The “workamper” jobs range from helping harvest sugar beets to flipping burgers at baseball spring training games to Amazon’s AMZN, +2.87% “CamperForce,” seasonal employees who can walk the equivalent of 15 miles a day during Christmas season pulling items off warehouse shelves and then returning to frigid campgrounds at night. Living on less than $1,000 a month, in certain cases, some have no hot showers. As Bruder writes, these are “people who never imagined being nomads.” Many saw their savings wiped out during the Great Recession or were foreclosure victims and, writes Bruder, “felt they’d spent too long losing a...

BIG MOVES Ancient DNA indicates horse-riding pastoralists called the Yamnaya made two long-distance migrations around 5,000 years ago. One trip may have shaped Europe’s ancient Corded Ware culture, while the other launched central Asia’s Afanasievo culture. Nomadic herders living on western Asia’s hilly grasslands made a couple of big moves east and west around 5,000 years ago. These were not typical, back-and-forth treks from one seasonal grazing spot to another. These people blazed new trails. A technological revolution had transformed travel for ancient herders around that time. Of course they couldn’t make online hotel reservations. Trip planners would have searched...

Did hyperactivity evolve as a survival aid for nomads? 11:39 10 June 2008 NewScientist.com news service Ewen Callaway Impulsivity and a short attention span may be the bane of every parent with a hyperactive toddler, but those same traits seem to help Kenyan nomads keep weight on. A gene mutation tied to attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD) is also associated with increased weight among a chronically undernourished group of nomads called the Ariaal. Notably, the mutation offers no such benefit to a cousin population that gave up the nomadic lifestyle in the 1960s. The nomads' active and unpredictable life centred...

Hookworms hitched rides with nomads Ben Harder Horseback-riding herders known as Scythians or Scythes once traveled far and wide across Eurasia. Their dead have the parasites to prove it. FEEDING THE WORMS. Researchers found hookworm eggs in the remains of two nomads buried in Central Asia 2,300 years ago. Lancet A man and a woman who were buried separately about 2,300 years ago and recently excavated in Berel, Kazakhstan, were infected with hookworms during their lifetimes, researchers have determined. Hookworms weren't then and still aren't typically found in the steppes of central Asia. "This finding demonstrated that Scythes, a nomadic...

The nomads drive their animals hundreds of miles to find food Niger's nomadic groups are facing extreme hardship as a result of the food crisis, says a report by international charity Oxfam.Nomads surveyed by the charity said that up to 70% of their livestock had died because of a lack of fodder. Livestock are essential to the nomadic way of life and "targeted assistance" will be needed to help them, it says. Nomads such as the Tuareg and Fulani make up about 20% of Niger's 12.9 million population. "For Niger's nomads, the situation is desperate. To these people, losing...

Exotic relics found in ancient nomads' tombs in Inner Mongolia www.chinaview.cn 2003-10-28 17:13:28 ¡¡¡¡HOHHOT, Oct. 28 (Xinhuanet) -- Judging from bronze articles unearthed from ancient tombs in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, archaeologists estimate that nomadic tribes in north China had contacts with Western civilizations approximately 2,500 years ago.¡¡¡¡Local archaeologists found a bronze mirror and a bronze plate at the two ancient tomb sites in Liangcheng county which can be traced back to the Spring and Autumn Period (770-476 B.C.) and the Warring States Period (475-221 B.C.), which they believed could not be the work of ancient northern peoples in...

<p>ALBANY -- Despite having a business-friendly governor and a humming economy, New York lost more residents to other parts of the country than any other state in the last half of the 1990s, new figures from the U.S. Census Bureau show.</p>

DIWANIYA, Iraq, March 30 — The first Iraqis walked in off the plains at sunrise, a group of nomads with their camels in tow. Then came a young farmer, bearing a white flag. "I have come to get water," said the man, Khalid Juwad, staring into the rifles of several young marines. "I am willing to cooperate." And so the Americans lowered their guns, and Mr. Juwad walked across the front lines, becoming one of the first Iraqis to meet American soldiers here in something other than combat. With so much of the American effort spent racing across empty deserts,...

DALLAS (AP) _ The tearful testimonial Madelyne Gorman Toogood gave in front of glaring TV cameras after she was videotaped beating her daughter was starkly uncharacteristic of the reclusive, media-shy Irish Travelers culture to which she belongs, experts say. Toogood, who was caught beating her 4-year-old daughter, Martha, in a department store parking lot, said she is a member of the clannish, nomadic culture of Irish descendants, most of whom came to the United States as refugees during the potato famine in the 1840s. ``By nature, they're very reclusive people,'' said Joe Livingston, a South Carolina state investigator who has...