The arrival of food producers to southern Africa was the end of a long process of gradual dispersal. The route of domestic animals into the subcontinent had to be from the north, as there are no wild progenitors of the animals (cattle, sheep, goats) or traditional African grains (sorghum, millet) to be found in southern Africa, but how these were transferred is still disputed.
It used to be thought that the introduction of domestic food products was initially done by immigrant Iron Age farmers into South Africa, but it is now clear that these farmers only arrived about 1800 years ago, and the sheep bones found mostly in cave sites of the Western and Southern Cape predate their arrival by at least 200 years.
The Khoekhoen (‘Hottentots’) are known historically as the herders of the Cape, and were some of the earliest sub-Saharan Africans to be met by European travelers in the fifteenth century. Their wealth in cattle made them a focus of attention, as their animals were used to refresh the ships plying the East India trade.
Once sheep were excavated from sites at the Cape dating to 2000 years ago, and especially when excavations began at Kasteelberg on the west coast of South Africa, north of Cape Town, and dates of over 1800 years emerged in association with large numbers of sheep bones, it was immediately assumed that the shepherds were ancestors of the historic Khoekhoen. Today, not everyone agrees with this assumption, so there is some debate on the development of pastoral society in South Africa.
There are thus two components to the arguments on the origins of food production in southern Africa:
(1) how the animals and plants got there, and by whom; (2) what happened once these commodities arrived and spread to the Cape.
World History
