Abstract
We use archaeological data and spatial methods to reconstruct the dispersal of farming into areas of sub-Saharan Africa now occupied by Bantu language speakers, and introduce a new large-scale radiocarbon database and a new suite of spatial modelling techniques. We also introduce a method of estimating phylogeographic relationships from archaeologically-modelled dispersal maps, with results produced in a format that enables comparison with linguistic and genetic phylogenies. Several hypotheses are explored. The ‘deep split’ hypothesis suggests that an early-branching eastern Bantu stream spread around the northern boundary of the equatorial rainforest, but recent linguistic and genetic work tends not to support this. An alternative riverine/littoral hypothesis suggests that rivers and coastlines facilitated the migration of the first farmers/horticulturalists, with some extending this to include rivers through the rainforest as conduits to East Africa. More recently, research has shown that a grassland corridor opened through the rainforest at around 3000–2500 BP, and the possible effect of this on migrating populations is also explored. Our results indicate that rivers and coasts were important dispersal corridors, but do not resolve the debate about a ‘Deep Split’. Future work should focus on improving the size, quality and geographical coverage of the archaeological 14C database; on augmenting the information base to establish descent relationships between archaeological sites and regions based on shared material cultural traits; and on refining the associated physical geographical reconstructions of changing land cover.
Highlights
In just a few thousand years farming spread from a cradle in West Africa to cover an area of more than 23 million square kilometres of sub-Saharan Africa, occupied today by more than 200 million Bantu language speakers speaking approximately 440 to 680 different Bantu languages [1]
There is reason to believe that the map is influenced by research effort: in Zambia and Zimbabwe, where there is a greater density of dated sites (Figure 1 and table S3), there are earlier sites than in neighbouring countries; while the gap in coverage along coastal northern Mozambique may explain the seemingly late appearance of farming in that long part of the eastern coastal region
Archaeologists have long emphasised the possibility of deep split in the dispersal history of first farmers in the Bantu-speaking regions, a view that has been partly conditioned by early dates in the interlacustrine region of east Africa
Summary
In just a few thousand years farming spread from a cradle in West Africa to cover an area of more than 23 million square kilometres of sub-Saharan Africa, occupied today by more than 200 million Bantu language speakers speaking approximately 440 to 680 different Bantu languages [1]. It has been hypothesised that farming and Bantu languages dispersed simultaneously through demic expansion [2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. Linguistic and archaeological evidence places the cradle of Bantu-language speakers in the Nigeria-Cameroon border area [7,16] and it is from here, that the expansion of pottery-making Neolithic Bantu-speaking horticulturalists/farmers started, with archaeologists finding apparent evidence for an early ‘deep split’ into two branches: the Eastern Bantu and the Western Bantu [6,7,16,17]. The earliest pottery found in a Bantu-speaker area is that from the site of Shum Laka in north-western Cameroon, dating to perhaps as early as 7000 BP [18,19,20,21,22]. The expansion of the Western branch southwards and south-eastwards through Central Africa continued as far as the present Zambia-
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