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Acheulean industry appeared during the Early Stone Age c. First evident about 1,, years ago, it seems to have spread from eastern Africa throughout the continent and also to Europe and Asia during the Middle Pleistocene Epoch , reaching Southern Africa about 1,, years ago; Acheulean industry remained dominant for more than 1,, years. During this time early humans also developed those social, cognitive , and linguistic traits that distinguish Homo sapiens.
Some of the earliest fossils associated with Homo sapiens , dated from about , to 80, years ago, have been found in South Africa at the Klasies River Mouth Cave in Eastern Cape , while at Border Cave on the South Africa—Swaziland border a date of about 90, years ago has been claimed for similar Middle Stone Age , to 30, years ago skeletal remains. With the emergence of Homo sapiens , experimentation and regional diversification displaced the undifferentiated Acheulean tool kit, and a far more efficient small blade also called microlithic technology evolved.
Through the controlled use of fire, denser, more mobile populations could move for the first time into heavily wooded areas and caves. Wood, bark, and leather were used for tools and clothing, while vegetable foods were also probably more important than their archaeological survival suggests. Some scholars believe that the addition of organized hunting to gathering and scavenging transformed human society. The large number of distinctive Late Stone Age 30, to 2, years ago industries that emerged reflect increasing specialization as hunter-gatherers exploited different environments , often moving seasonally between them, and developed different subsistence strategies.
As in many parts of the world, changes in technology seem to mark a shift to the consumption of smaller game, fish, invertebrates, and plants. Late Stone Age peoples used bows and arrows and a variety of snares and traps for hunting, as well as grindstones and digging sticks for gathering plant food; with hooks, barbed spears, and wicker baskets they also were able to catch fish and thus exploit rivers, lakeshores, and seacoasts more effectively. Despite the ever-increasing number of radiocarbon dates available for the many Late Stone Age sites excavated in Southern Africa, the reasons for changed consumption patterns and variations in technology are poorly understood.
Until the s, population explosion and migration were the common explanations; subsequent explanations have stressed adaptation.
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Yet the reasons for adaptation are equally unclear and the model equally controversial. Environmental changes do not seem to have been directly responsible, while the evidence for social change is elusive. Nevertheless, the appearance of cave art, careful burials, and ostrich-eggshell beads for adornment suggests more sophisticated behaviour and new patterns of culture.
These developments apparently are associated with the emergence between 20, and 15, bce of the earliest of the historically recognizable populations of Southern Africa: the Pygmy, San, and Khoekhoe peoples, who were probably genetically related to the ancient population that h evolved in the African subcontinent. Although many scholars attempt to deduce the nature of Late Stone Age societies by examining contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, this method is fraught with difficulties. Evidence from Botswana and Namibia suggests that many contemporary hunter-gatherers recently have been dispossessed and that their present way of life, far from being the result of thousands of years of stagnation and isolation, has resulted from their integration into the modern world economy; this hardly provides an adequate model for reconstructions of earlier societies.
During historic times hunter-gatherers were organized in loosely knit bands, of which the family was the basic unit, although wider alliances with neighbouring bands were essential for survival. Each group had its own territory, in which special importance was attached to natural resources, and in many instances bands moved seasonally from small to large camping sites, following water, game, and vegetation.
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Labour was allocated by gender, with men responsible for hunting game, women for snaring small animals, collecting plant foods, and undertaking domestic chores. These patterns are also evident in the recent archaeological record, but it is unclear how far they can be safely projected back. Contrary to the popular view that the hunter-gatherer way of life was impoverished and brutish, Late Stone Age people were highly skilled and had a good deal of leisure and a rich spiritual life, as their cave paintings and rock engravings show. While exact dating of cave paintings is problematic, paintings at the Apollo 11 Cave in southern Namibia appear to be some 26, to 28, years old.
Whereas the art in the northern woodlands is stylized and schematic, that of the savanna and coastlands seems more naturalistic, showing scenes of hunting and fishing, of ritual and celebration; it vividly portrays the Late Stone Age cosmology and way of life. The motives of the artists remain obscure, but many paintings appear linked to the trance experiences of medicine men, in which the antelope eland was a key symbol.
In later rock paintings there is also the first hint of the advent of new groups of herders and farmers.
In the long run these new groups of herders and farmers transformed the hunter-gatherer way of life. Initially, however, distinctions between early pastoralists, farmers, and hunter-gatherers were not overwhelming, and in many areas the various groups coexisted. The first evidence of pastoralism in the subcontinent occurs on a scattering of sites in the more arid west; there the bones of sheep and goats, accompanied by stone tools and pottery , date to some 2, years ago, about years before iron-using farmers first arrived in the better-watered eastern half of the region.
It is with the origins of these food-producing communities and their evolution into the contemporary societies of Southern Africa that much of the precolonial history of the subcontinent has been concerned. Linguistic evidence suggests that the languages of the later Khoekhoe the so-called Khoisan languages originated in one of the hunter-gatherer languages of northern Botswana.
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In the colonial period, destitute Khoekhoe often reverted to a hunter-gatherer existence; herders and hunters were also frequently physically indistinguishable and used identical stone tools. Thus, the Dutch, and many subsequent social scientists, believed they belonged to a single population following different modes of subsistence: hunting, foraging, beachcombing, and herding. For this reason the groups are often referred to as Khoisan, a compound word referring to Khoekhoe and San , as the Nama called hunter-gatherers without livestock Bushmen, in the terminology of the colonists, is now considered pejorative.
The archaeological remains of nomadic pastoralists living in impermanent polities are frustratingly sparse, but in the upper Zambezi River valley, southwestern Zimbabwe, and Botswana, herding and pottery appear late in the 1st millennium bce. Cattle and milking appear somewhat later than small stock and were perhaps acquired from iron-using farmers in western Zimbabwe or northeastern South Africa.
The loosely organized herders expanded rapidly, driven by their need for fresh grazing areas.
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Along with pastoralism and pottery came other signs of change: domestic dogs, changes in stone tool kits, altered settlement patterns, larger ostrich-eggshell beads, and the appearance of marine shells in the interior, which suggests the existence of long-distance trade. By the second half of the 1st millennium ce , farming communities were living in relatively large, semipermanent villages. They cultivated sorghum, millet, and legumes and herded sheep, goats, and some cattle; made pottery and fashioned iron tools to turn the soil and cut their crops; and engaged in long-distance trade.
Salt, iron implements , pottery, and possibly copper ornaments passed from hand to hand and were traded widely. Some communities settled near exceptionally good salt, metal, or clay deposits or became known for their specialist craftsmen. Archaeologists are divided over whether all these cultural and economic attributes arrived with a single group of new immigrants speaking a new language or resulted from a more piecemeal development of different skills and the adoption of new techniques by indigenous hunter-gatherers, as has already been suggested in the case of herding among the Khoekhoe.
Moreover, archaeologists disagree about the routes and modes of dispersal as well as its timing.
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It seems likely, however, that a movement of immigrants into Southern Africa occurred in two streams and was part of a wider expansion of populations speaking Bantu languages that ultimately derived from the Niger-Congo languages of western Africa some 2, to 3, years ago. Similar pottery has been found stretching from northeastern Tanzania and coastal Kenya through southern Zimbabwe into eastern South Africa, Mozambique, and Swaziland.
These early farmers settled on arable soils along coastal dunes, rivers, and valley basins. Where possible, they exploited marine resources, planted cereals, and worked iron; cattle and long-distance trade were insignificant. Even before the 1st millennium ce , pottery similar to that of the eastern stream was being made in the upper Zambezi valley, and pottery of a slightly more recent date has been found in parts of northern Angola.
It was probably from these communities that the Bantu speakers spread into the more arid western half of the subcontinent, northwestern Zambia, southwestern Zimbabwe, along the eastern margins of the Kalahari into Botswana, and later into eastern South Africa and Mozambique. Like their counterparts in the east, western-stream Bantu speakers cultivated cereals, worked metal, and made pottery, but the evidence of livestock is far more clear-cut; at first they primarily raised sheep and goats, slightly later cattle. While some argue that the shift to livestock raising merely reflects the human impact on the environment as new lands were opened up for grazing animals, others associate the appearance of domestic stock with the emergence of a different and distinctive tradition of ceramics and a characteristic settlement pattern—known as the Central Cattle Pattern—that embodied both the new centrality of cattle and the different nature of hierarchy in these communities.
Although at first the impact of food production was probably less momentous than is often assumed, agriculture combined with pastoralism and metallurgy could support far larger settled communities than previously had been possible and enabled a more complex social and political organization to develop.
Cattle raising led to increased social stratification between rich and poor and established new divisions of labour between men and women; the accumulation of cattle and the continuous site occupation inherent in cereal production enabled the storage of wealth and the deployment of more organized political power. Keep abreast on how Legal technology is changing the way legal professional work.
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