Bantu expansion shows that habitat alters the route and pace of human dispersals

Unlike most other biological species, humans can use cultural innovations to occupy a range of environments, raising the intriguing question of whether human migrations move relatively independently of habitat or show preferences for familiar ones. The Bantu expansion that swept out of West Central Africa beginning ∼5,000 y ago is one of the most influential cultural events of its kind, eventually spreading over a vast geographical area a new way of life in which farming played an increasingly important role. We use a new dated phylogeny of ∼400 Bantu languages to show that migrating Bantu-speaking populations did not expand from their ancestral homeland in a “random walk” but, rather, followed emerging savannah corridors, with rainforest habitats repeatedly imposing temporal barriers to movement. When populations did move from savannah into rainforest, rates of migration were slowed, delaying the occupation of the rainforest by on average 300 y, compared with similar migratory movements exclusively within savannah or within rainforest by established rainforest populations. Despite unmatched abilities to produce innovations culturally, unfamiliar habitats significantly alter the route and pace of human dispersals.

Download Full-text

The significance of Drought, Disease and Famine in the agriculturally marginal zones of West-Central Africa

The Journal of African History ◽

10.1017/s0021853700020235 ◽

1982 ◽

Vol 23 (1) ◽

pp. 17-61 ◽

Cited By ~ 64

Author(s):

Joseph C. Miller

Keyword(s):

Central Africa ◽

Western Coast ◽

African History ◽

Way Of Life ◽

The South ◽

Epidemiological Factors ◽

Documentary Sources ◽

West Central ◽

Marginal Zones ◽

To Receive

Some 170 references to drought and disease along the south-western coast of Central Africa between 1550 and 1830 suggest that climatic and epidemiological factors motivated the farmers and herders of West-Central Africa in historically significant ways. Nearly all references come from documentary sources and so bear primarily on conditions in the drier and less fertile areas near Luanda and to the south, where African reactions would have been strongest.While minor shortages of rain occurred too frequently to receive much explicit attention in the documents, longer droughts spread more widely every decade or so and attracted notice. Major periods of dryness, extending for seven years or more and touching all parts of the region, occurred perhaps once each century and produced comments throughout the documentation.Localized minor droughts hardly disrupted the lives of Africans, who had presumably devised agricultural and pastoral strategies to take account of such ordinary climatic variation. Two-or three-year rainfall shortages produced banditry and warfare that often attracted Portuguese military retaliation. Major droughts disrupted polities and societies and hence coincided with major turning points in West-Central African history in the late sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries. In the earlier case, agricultural failures produced the famed ‘Jaga’ or Imbangala warriors, who elevated pillage to a way of life and who joined the Portuguese in establishing the Angolan slave trade. The later, protracted drought from 1784 to 1793 coincided with the historic peak of slave exports from West-Central Africa.

Download Full-text

The Bantu Expansion

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.191 ◽

2018 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Koen Bostoen

Keyword(s):

Late Holocene ◽

Driving Forces ◽

Central Africa ◽

Stone Tools ◽

Technological Innovations ◽

Way Of Life ◽

Hunter Gatherers ◽

Bantu Languages ◽

Speech Communities ◽

Eastern And Southern Africa

The Bantu Expansion stands for the concurrent dispersal of Bantu languages and Bantu-speaking people from an ancestral homeland situated in the Grassfields region in the borderland between current-day Nigeria and Cameroon. During their initial migration across most of Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa, which took place between approximately 5,000 and 1,500 years ago, Bantu speech communities not only introduced new languages in the areas where they immigrated but also new lifestyles, in which initially technological innovations such as pottery making and the use of large stone tools played an important role as did subsequently also farming and metallurgy. Wherever early Bantu speakers started to develop a sedentary way of life, they left an archaeologically visible culture. Once settled, Bantu-speaking newcomers strongly interacted with autochthonous hunter-gatherers, as is still visible in the gene pool and/or the languages of certain present-day Bantu speech communities. The driving forces behind what is the principal linguistic, cultural, and demographic process in Late Holocene Africa are still a matter of debate, but it is increasingly accepted that the climate-induced destruction of the rainforest in West Central Africa around 2,500 years ago gave a boost to the Bantu Expansion.

Download Full-text

Linguistic Evidence for the Introduction of Ironworking into Bantu-Speaking Africa

History in Africa ◽

10.1353/hia.2006.0022 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 33 ◽

pp. 321-361 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Jan Vansina

Keyword(s):

Great Lakes ◽

Central African Republic ◽

Historical Linguistics ◽

Central Africa ◽

Historical Study ◽

Language Family ◽

Lake Chad ◽

Bantu Languages ◽

West Central ◽

Linguistic Evidence

Did Africans once independently invent the smelting of metals or did they obtain this technology from Europe or the Middle East? This continues to be an unresolved and hotly disputed issue, mainly because the dates for the earliest appearance of smelting in Africa south of the Sahara remain inconclusive. All the earliest sites in Western and West-Central Africa from Walalde in Senegal to the Tigidit cliffs and Termit in Niger, the firki plains south of lake Chad, Taruga, and perhaps Nsukka in Nigeria, Ghwa Kiva (Nigeria), and Doulo (Cameroon) in the Mandara mountains, Gbabiri (Ndio district) in the Central African Republic, and a few sites in Rwanda, Burundi, and Buhaya cannot be dated more closely than between 840 and 420 BCE. Greater precision is impossible because the C14 curve runs flat during these four centuries, hence all these sites yield the same date. (Alpern, Killick, Me Eachern, Holl, Jézégou/Clist, Kanimba Misago). If the earliest “real” dates fell before 800 BCE, they would support independent invention, while later dates strengthen the case for borrowing. Still, this information does tell us that ironworking was adopted in the northern parts of West and West -Central Africa and in the region of the Great Lakes within the span of a mere four centuries.The emergence of ironworking must have left linguistic traces in the relevant terminology irrespective of whether it spread by borrowing or by independent invention—hence historical linguistics can contribute to this debate. That approach is best tested by an examination of the relevant vocabulary in Bantu languages because the historical study of those languages is further advanced than that of any other language family in Africa (Nurse/Phillipson). Moreover Bantu-speakers occupy a large portion of the continent.

Download Full-text

Registers of African-derived lexicon in Uruguay: etymologies, demography and semantic change

Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie (ZrP) ◽

10.1515/zrp-2019-0006 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 135 (1) ◽

pp. 223-255

Author(s):

Laura Álvarez López ◽

Magdalena Coll

Keyword(s):

Demographic Data ◽

Central Africa ◽

Social Behaviors ◽

The Other ◽

African Origin ◽

Semantic Change ◽

Bantu Languages ◽

La Plata ◽

West Central ◽

Lexical Items

Abstract The present paper deals with 82 words of possible African origin registered in Uruguay by Ildefonso Pereda Valdés and Rolando Laguarda Trías between 1937 and 1965. Many of the lexical items were probably introduced by enslaved Africans brought to the region during the 18th and 19th centuries. Evidence shows that most of the words are apparently shared with varieties of Spanish outside the Rio de la Plata region, and most of them also appear in neighboring Argentina and Brazil. Furthermore, the African-derived lexicon is often used to denominate the ‘other’ with respect to people and social behaviors, and most of these loanwords are nouns with possible origins in Bantu languages spoken in West-Central Africa, which corresponds to the available demographic data.

Download Full-text