South Eastern Bantu-speaking (SEB) groups constitute more than 80% of the population in South Africa. Despite clear linguistic and geographic diversity, the genetic differences between these groups have not been systematically investigated. Based on genome-wide data of over 5000 individuals, representing eight major SEB groups, we provide strong evidence for fine-scale population structure that broadly aligns with geographic distribution and is also congruent with linguistic phylogeny (separation of Nguni, Sotho-Tswana and Tsonga speakers). Although differential Khoe-San admixture plays a key role, the structure persists after Khoe-San ancestry-masking. The timing of admixture, levels of sex-biased gene flow and population size dynamics also highlight differences in the demographic histories of individual groups. The comparisons with five Iron Age farmer genomes further support genetic continuity over ~400 years in certain regions of the country. Simulated trait genome-wide association studies further show that the observed population structure could have major implications for biomedical genomics research in South Africa.

KwaGandaganda, Ndondondwane and Wosi were major Early Farming Community settlements in what is today the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa. These sites have yielded, among other remains, abundant evidence of ivory and ivory working dating to the seventh-tenth centuries AD, pre-dating by approximately 200 years the better-known ivory artefacts from sites in the Limpopo River Valley and surrounding regions. We report the results of carbon, nitrogen and strontium isotope analysis to explore the origins and procurement of this ivory, in combination with Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) to identify the species of animals from which it was derived. All of the ivory studied using ZooMS was elephant, despite the presence of hippopotamus remains on all three sites. Some ivory was probably obtained from elephant herds that lived close to the sites, in the densely wooded river valleys favoured by both elephants and early farmers. Other material came from savannah environments further afield. Ivory found at these three sites was drawn from different catchments, implying a degree of landscape/resource partitioning even at this early stage. These communities clearly invested substantial effort in obtaining ivory from across the region, which speaks to the importance of this commodity in the economy of the time. We suggest that some ivory items were for local use, but that some may have been intended for more distant markets via Indian Ocean trade. Afr Archaeol Rev (2016) 33:411-435

No abstract

Southernmost Africa (here meaning South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland) provides an excellent opportunity for investigating the relations between farming, herding and hunting-gathering communities over the past 2,000 years, as well as the development of societies committed to food production and their increasing engagement with the wider world through systems of exchange spanning the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. This paper surveys and evaluates the archaeological research relevant to these communities and issues carried out in the region since the early 1990s. Among other themes discussed are the processes responsible for the emergence and transformation of pastoralist societies (principally in the Cape), the ways in which rock art is increasingly being incorporated with other forms of archaeological data to build a more socially informed view of the past, the analytical strength and potential of ethnographically informed understandings of past farming societies and the important contribution that recent research on the development of complex societies in the Shashe-Limpopo Basin can make to comparative studies of state formation.

This review is a further development in the Journal of African History series of archaeological surveys away from the earlier radiocarbon date lists and towards regional examinations of recent archaeological evidence on food-producing societies. It is divided into two sections that examine respectively ‘Stone Age’ pastoralists in the drier west and ‘Iron Age’ agriculturalists in the better-watered east. Relations between food producers and hunter-gatherers are examined, particularly in the west, where it is becoming increasingly difficult to make meaningful distinctions between them in view of the variety of changes that took place roughly contemporaneously in both with the introduction of domestic stock. Several local sequences are beginning to suggest that socio-economic change took place within the framework of the local community rather than by the stereotypic, ethnic replacement model where Khoi succeeds San.There is much new evidence on communities with an agricultural economic base. The earliest evidence is examined from southern Mozambique and the Transvaal, including traces of first-millennium mercantile trade and its regional antecedents. There are contradictions between different models proposed to explain interactions with residual hunter-gatherer communities and with the natural environment. A major theme of recent studies has been the development and use of models derived from structuralist analysis of the classic ethnography of the region. Such models have given a new understanding of settlement patterns but in several respects are still the subject of controversy.