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( Bantu expansion)
The Bantu expansion was a millennia-long series of migrations of speakers of the original proto-Bantu language group. This group is hypothesized to have originated from the southwestern border of modern Nigeria and Cameroon. A diffusion of language and knowledge spread among neighboring populations, and a creation of new societal groups involving inter-marriage spread to new areas and communities. The expansion is taken to have begun after the introduction of agriculture, which would indicate a date of ca. 3000-2500 BCE for the early expansion within West Africa, followed by first eastwards and southwards migrations beyond West Africa from about 1500 to 1000 BCE.[2] Bantu-speakers developed novel methods of agriculture and metalworking which allowed people to colonize new areas with widely varying ecologies in greater densities than hunting and foraging permitted. They pushed out the hunter-forager Khoisan, who formerly inhabited these areas. Meanwhile in Eastern and Southern Africa, Bantu-speakers adopted livestock husbandry from other peoples they encountered, and in turn passed it to hunter-foragers. Herding practices reached the far south several centuries before Bantu-speaking migrants did. Archaeological, linguistic, genetic and environmental evidence all support the conclusion that the Bantu expansion was one of the most significant human migrations and cultural transformations within the past few thousand years. Before the expansion of farming and herding peoples, including those speaking Bantu languages, Africa south of the equator was populated by neolithic hunting and foraging peoples. Some of them were ancestral to modern Central African forest peoples (so-called Pygmies) who now speak Bantu languages. Others were proto-Khoisan-speaking peoples, whose few modern hunter-forager and linguistic descendants today occupy the arid regions around the Kalahari desert. Many more Khoekhoe and San descendants have a Coloured identity in South Africa and Namibia, speaking Afrikaans and English.
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