To find the origins of African pastoralism it is important archaeologists look for the wild progenitors of animals. The wild sheep of Africa (Ammotragus lervia) were never domesticated, so all domestic sheep and goats came from the Near East. There has been some debate over whether there was an independent domestication of African cattle, because wild cattle (Bos primigenius) remains have been found in the Nile Valley. Genetic evidence shows that the source of African domesticated cattle was the Levant, some 8,000 years ago. Cattle spread across the Sahara as the environment was conducive to pastoralism, being well watered at this time. This lasted until after 5000 bp when the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) retreated and the Sahara dried up to its present condition. The tsetse barrier also retreated at this time, allowing pastoralists to move south into West Africa and, via the Ethiopian highlands, to East Africa, arriving c.4500 bp, although it took another 1,000 years for them to fully adapt to the grasslands of southern Kenya and Tanzania. Domestic stock then went on to southern Africa via a tsetse-free corridor, arriving around 2000 bp. The effect of herding societies on local hunters throughout Africa appears to have been an initial rapprochement, with a later hardening of relations. In East Africa, this was probably due to the need to learn about the new environment with the help of local hunters and to adjust to new epizootic diseases. In southern Africa, the first pastoralists were primarily sheep herders during the 1st millennium bce, with few cattle bones being found from this time. Pastoralists only became fully fledged cattle herdsmen around 1000 bp when they developed the attributes of the historic Khoekhoen. A further debate existed in southern Africa over whether pastoralism there was the result of immigrant herders who arrived in the northern Kalahari and then spread to the Cape, or if local hunters took up sheep herding.

African domesticated animals, with the exception of the donkey, all came from the Near East. Some 8,000 years ago cattle, sheep, and goats came south to the Sahara which was much wetter than today. Pastoralism was an off-shoot of grain agriculture in the Near East, and those herders immigrating brought with them techniques of harvesting wild grains. With increasing aridity as the Saharan environment dried up around 5000 years ago, the herders began to control and manipulate their stands resulting in millet and sorghum domestication in the Sahel Zone, south of the Sahara. Pearl millet expanded to the south and was taken up by Bantu-speaking Iron Age farmers in the savanna areas of West Africa and then spread around the tropical forest into East Africa by 3000 b.p. As the Sahara dried up and the tsetse belts retreated, sheep and cattle also moved south. They expanded into East Africa via a tsetse-free environment of the Ethiopian highlands arriving around 4000 b.p. It took around 1000 years for the pastoralists to adapt to other epizootic diseases rife in this part of the continent before they could expand throughout the grasslands of Kenya and Tanzania. Thus, East Africa was a socially complex place 3000 years ago, with indigenous hunters, herders and farmers. This put pressure on pastoral use of the environment, so using another tsetse-free corridor from Tanzania, through Zambia to the northern Kalahari, then on to the Western Cape, herders moved to southern Africa, arriving 2000b.p. They were followed to the eastern part of South Africa by Bantu-speaking agro-pastoralists 1600 years ago who were able to use the summer rainfall area for their sorghum and millet crops. Control and manipulation of African indigenous plants of the forest regions probably has a long history from use by hunter-gatherers, but information on this is constrained by archaeological evidence, which is poor in tropical environments due to poor preservation. Evidence for early palm oil domestication has been found in Ghana dated to around 2550b.p. Several African indigenous plants are still widely used, such as yams, but the plant which has spread most widely throughout the world is coffee, originally from Ethiopia. Alien plants, such as maize, potatoes and Asian rice have displaced indigenous plants over much of Africa.

The archaeological sequence at Kasteelberg B, in the Western Cape of South Africa, spans a millennium and covers several distinct occupational phases in the early pastoralist settlement history of the region. Attempts to understand that history through coordinating archaeological, linguistic and genetic evidence have proved problematic. The refined programme of radiocarbon dating presented here sheds further light on the different phases of occupation. More remarkably, it suggests, despite changes in material culture, the persistence of a single population over time, rather than population replacement as has been previously conjectured.

The debate on how food production first began in southern Africa still continues, with new genetic evidence suggesting that it moved southwards from east Africa, showing connections in both human DNA and lactase persistence genes. This paper outlines the difficulties hunters might have faced in adopting herding, and asks whether a simple access model would be adequate to explain such an important event. A comparison between the different world views of hunters and herders is offered. For hunters, meat is the primary objective, and relations with prey species are important for success. Herders, by contrast, prefer to maximize milk production, and take responsibility for their stock to achieve this. Considering the sizeable number of animals needed for sustainable herd maintenance, off-take, etc, such responsibility would perhaps suggest that successful husbandry was beyond casual adoption of domestic animals by southern African hunters, particularly when there was no shortage of wild game and fish available.

What are the odds that nomadic pastoralist societies will survive well into the twenty-first century? The chapters in this book take a hard look at this question, examining how nomadic herdsmen are...

The oldest extant human maternal lineages include mitochondrial haplogroups L0d and L0k found in the southern African click-speaking forager peoples broadly classified as Khoesan. Profiling these early mitochondrial lineages allows for better understanding of modern human evolution. In this study, we profile 77 new early-diverged complete mitochondrial genomes and sub-classify another 105 L0d/L0k individuals from southern Africa. We use this data to refine basal phylogenetic divergence, coalescence times and Khoesan prehistory. Our results confirm L0d as the earliest diverged lineage (∼172 kya, 95%CI: 149-199 kya), followed by L0k (∼159 kya, 95%CI: 136-183 kya) and a new lineage we name L0g (∼94 kya, 95%CI: 72-116 kya). We identify two new L0d1 subclades we name L0d1d and L0d1c4/L0d1e, and estimate L0d2 and L0d1 divergence at ∼93 kya (95%CI:76-112 kya). We concur the earliest emerging L0d1'2 sublineage L0d1b (∼49 kya, 95%CI:37-58 kya) is widely distributed across southern Africa. Concomitantly, we find the most recent sublineage L0d2a (∼17 kya, 95%CI:10-27 kya) to be equally common. While we agree that lineages L0d1c and L0k1a are restricted to contemporary inland Khoesan populations, our observed predominance of L0d2a and L0d1a in non-Khoesan populations suggests a once independent coastal Khoesan prehistory. The distribution of early-diverged human maternal lineages within contemporary southern Africans suggests a rich history of human existence prior to any archaeological evidence of migration into the region. For the first time, we provide a genetic-based evidence for significant modern human evolution in southern Africa at the time of the Last Glacial Maximum at between ∼21-17 kya, coinciding with the emergence of major lineages L0d1a, L0d2b, L0d2d and L0d2a.

The oldest contemporary human mitochondrial lineages arose in Africa. The earliest divergent extant maternal offshoot, namely haplogroup L0d, is represented by click-speaking forager peoples of southern Africa. Broadly defined as Khoesan, contemporary Khoesan are today largely restricted to the semidesert regions of Namibia and Botswana, whereas archeological, historical, and genetic evidence promotes a once broader southerly dispersal of click-speaking peoples including southward migrating pastoralists and indigenous marine-foragers. No genetic data have been recovered from the indigenous peoples that once sustained life along the southern coastal waters of Africa prepastoral arrival. In this study we generate a complete mitochondrial genome from a 2,330-year-old male skeleton, confirmed through osteological and archeological analysis as practicing a marine-based forager existence. The ancient mtDNA represents a new L0d2c lineage (L0d2c1c) that is today, unlike its Khoe-language based sister-clades (L0d2c1a and L0d2c1b) most closely related to contemporary indigenous San-speakers (specifically Ju). Providing the first genomic evidence that prepastoral Southern African marine foragers carried the earliest diverged maternal modern human lineages, this study emphasizes the significance of Southern African archeological remains in defining early modern human origins.

People and animals in Holocene Africa: recent advances in archaeozoology, edited by Helene Jousse and Josephine Lesur. Frankfurt am Main, Africa Magna Verlag, Reports in African Archaeology 2, 2011...

The concept of a ‘Neolithic’ expansion into Southern Africa, using analogy with the European Neolithic, has recently been mooted. The debate on the arrival of domesticated animals revolves around two issues: 1) the animals were brought in by immigrant herdsmen, possibly speaking a Khoe-related language, who then dispersed across the sub-continent, arriving at the Cape some 2000 years ago; 2) once the animals had arrived in southern Africa, they were dispersed across the sub-continent through internal exchange mechanisms by local hunters who became herders. This paper will argue against a simple model of a ‘Neolithic’ expansion by discussing basic theoretical models of the difficulty of ideological shifts from extractive to productive ways of life. It has to be recognised that the archaeological evidence for early pastoralism across this huge area is at best ‘patchy’. Nonetheless, the question of archaeological evidence for different economic strategies will be fundamental to the argument. The incorporation of genetic studies, and the possibility of reconstructing both linguistic connections and transformations through the languages of hunting and herding in Southern Africa could allow us to add independent variables on who the populations were who introduced the stock, and if, indeed, there were early immigrating Khoe-speakers to the Cape. Once a genetic base-line of who the indigenous people of the Cape were prior to the arrival of domestic stock is developed, we will have a comparison with who existed before and after 2000 BP. The ‘how’ of pastoral development can be an attainable goal, but the ‘why’ may still remain elusive.

With 25 years of study of the origins of pastoralism at the Cape, this article is a retrospective reflection on how far we have come in answering questions of how domestic stock arrived in southern Africa, and the mechanisms for dispersal to the ends of the continent. New data on genetics, linguistics and physical anthropology allow more creative modelling of the archaeology.

The most complete evidence we have for the earliest small stock husbandry in South Africa comes from the Vredenburg Peninsula in the Western Cape. The introduction of sheep some 2000 years ago begs the question of how they got there. Connections further north are examined, but the evidence for their passage South is weak, and we often have to use ceramics as a proxy for their existence. It is suggested that the original model of a Khoe connection with northeast Botswana on linguistic grounds seems the most viable. If this is correct then the model of an early Khoe migration to the Cape would have greater validity than local hunters becoming herders, which, in turn, rejects any idea of a local 'neolithization' event.

ABSTRACT The occupants of the herding site of Kasteelberg, located 4 km from the coast, focused on harvesting seals that appear to have been an important source of fat. The site was most likely used as a seasonal ceremonial aggregation place, and use of fat mixed with ochre as body adornment was a form of conspicuous consumption among African herders, including the historic Khoekhoen (“Hottentots’’) of the Cape. At Kasteelberg, access to marine mammal fat was an attractive alternative to the butter-fat more commonly used for such body decoration. The debate on what might be the more accurate indicators of seasonal occupation using seal data is discussed, and two periods, in May and October, would seem to be the best with other seasonal indicators of sheep breeding.

Scholars have long acknowledged a gap in the archaeological literature on African herder societies. Utilizing almost 40 years’ work, Andrew Smith presents a detailed portrait of modern herdsmen and their historical antecedents. Following the assumption that Africa has never been isolated from the rest of the world, Smith illuminates key topics ranging from material culture and rituals, to future prospects for pastoralists. Written in a scholarly yet accessible style, Smith presents evidence detailing African herders’ historical relationship to similar societies in the Near East, as well as their present state in the modern world. This volume will be indispensable to understanding the unique role pastoralists have played over time throughout the continent.

The use of the term ‘Neolithic', although seen by some researchers as a convenient shorthand, has a great deal of baggage associated with it, which makes it problematic for use in Africa. This is particularly true for southern Africa where the process of introduction of food production was probably different from that experienced in the Middle East, Europe, or even North Africa, as no wild progenitors of the domestic plants or animals existed south of the Equator. The suggestion that a southern African ‘Neolithic’ might have existed makes certain assumptions that are dependent on how one interprets the archaeological record.

Smith et al. (1991) proposed a model to distinguish the archaeological sites of Khoekhoe pastoralists from those of San. This model was based on information gathered from sites scattered over hundreds of square kilometres and several millennia. Between 1999 and 2002 we re-examined Smith et al.'s (1991) model by excavating six neighbouring contemporary sites on the hill Kasteelberg. In a previous survey, three of these sites had been provisionally identified as pastoralist sites and three as forager sites. Here we present a brief comparison of the materials from these six sites. Although there are clear differences between the two sets of sites, the hypothesis that one set represents Khoekhoe herders and the other bushman hunter-gatherers is not supported. Rather, one set of sites seems to represent a more mobile, herder-forager adaptation with a preference for inland resources while the other set appears to represent a more sedentary herder-forager adaptation with emphasis on shoreline resources. It remains to be determined how the occupants of the two sets of sites related to each other.