Why such negativity towards pastoral people?

            Historians love to neglect the pastoral people and their contribution to world history, but I can't for the life of me understand why.  Pastoral people have always been the ones how have mastered the skill of domesticating useful animals and crops that others have tried and failed at.  Before the Mongols pastoral people had been the ones to introduce domesticated horses to the Chinese Culture along with different types of rice that would allow for larger crop yields especially in times of a drought.  But do the historians like to dig into how these groups of people came to be or how they became so well versed in their trades? No! They just merely pass over them without really acknowledging their importance and value. 

            Something else that I have observed in this book is that the settled societies have such a negative feelings towards these pastoral people.  I mean I get it, in a time when conformity was key and becoming a well established and thriving community was the ideal way to live, how could they possibly understand why some people would choose to ignore this new adaptive lifestyle.  In the mind of these settled societies, they viewed these people as trouble, and anti government.  They actively chose to not be a part of what your society believes in, so I get why they didn't exactly jump at the opportunity to befriend such people.  It is also hard to understand a group of people whose outlook on life is completely different from yours. The settled societies gave up their nomadic lifestyle for a more comfortable one growing their own food.  The no longer believed in putting their lives in the hands of nature, and the migration of animals, they were taking their lives into control.  But what these settled people failed to see is that even though these pastoral people lived on the fringes of society, they were completely free to live their lives as they chose.  They were not under the rule of some power hungry dictator trying to make a name for himself.  They were living just as their ancestors lived and were happy with how their lives were.  They were not concerned about how they can further themselves on the societal totem pole that many of these settled society living people were. 

            So I really can't understand why the historians would choose to neglect these pastoral people.  Maybe it is because their lives were rather boring and mundane, because they didn't have the nonsense that comes with political power that existed in the settled societies.  I think that maybe historians are secretly drawn to drama, because lets be real, people don't really care about the boring history or a relaxed group of people.  People are interested in wars, battles, and disease, those are the things that keep people digging further into the past for answers.