The role of the Cape’s unique climatic boundaries in sustaining specialised pastoralists in southern Africa during the last 2000 years

Abstract

ABSTRACTGenetic analyses show that milch pastoralism existed in southern Africa for at least the last 1300 years. This paper addresses the question of how specialised milch pastoralists would have sustained their herds in the arid western half of southern Africa, where archaeological evidence shows their traces. This might be down to what Jared Diamond terms ‘geographic luck’, i.e. that pastoralists, whom we know moved rapidly to the southern and western Cape, discovered the winter rainfall and all year round rainfall areas that are unique in southern Africa and settled there. Good grazing and all year-round rainfall would have been found by moving between these zones and the summer rainfall zone of the neighbouring Northern and Eastern Cape Provinces. These zones fall outside the areas that were later settled by agropastoralist farmers. European mariner sightings of livestock along South Africa’s shores from the end of the fifteenth century AD onward have previously been used to reconstruct the seasonal movements of pastoralists. There is, however, an inherent bias in these data caused by the prevailing wind patterns that determined the timing of mariners’ arrival to the Cape.