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As the exception on the continent, southern Africa has no Neolithic period. In the 1920s, when the term came to mean Stone Age with food production, Neolithic was dropped in South Africa for lack of evidence for farming or herding in Stone Age sites. But since the late 1960s many sheep bones have surfaced in just such sites. Now, the continued absence of a Neolithic may say more about the politics of South African archaeology than about its prehistory. This paper describes food production in the southern African late Stone Age and argues in favor of (re-)introducing the term Neolithic to the subcontinent.

After several decades of research on the subject, we now know when the first livestock reached southern Africa but the question of how they got there remains a contentious topic. Debate centres on whether they were brought with a large migration of Khoe-speakers who originated from East Africa; or whether the livestock were traded down-the-line among hunter-gatherer communities; or indeed whether there was a long history of diverse small scale population movements in this part of the world, one or more of which ‘infiltrated’ livestock into southern Africa. A new analysis of the distribution of stone toolkits from a sizeable sample of sub-equatorial African Later Stone Age sites, coupled with existing knowledge of the distribution of the earliest livestock remains and ceramics vessels, has allowed us to isolate two separate infiltration events that brought the first livestock into southern Africa just over 2000 years ago; one infiltration was along the Atlantic seaboard and another entered the middle reaches of the Limpopo River Basin. These findings agree well with the latest results of genetic research which together indicate that multiple, small-scale infiltrations probably were responsible for bringing the first livestock into southern Africa.

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