Divergence and contact in Southern Bantu language and population history (original) (raw)
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Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2013
There is disagreement about the routes taken by populations speaking Bantu languages as they expanded to cover much of sub-Saharan Africa. Here, we build phylogenetic trees of Bantu languages and map them onto geographical space in order to assess the likely pathway of expansion and test between dispersal scenarios. The results clearly support a scenario in which groups first moved south through the rainforest from a homeland somewhere near the Nigeria -Cameroon border. Emerging on the south side of the rainforest, one branch moved south and west. Another branch moved towards the Great Lakes, eventually giving rise to the monophyletic clade of East Bantu languages that inhabit East and Southeastern Africa. These phylogenies also reveal information about more general processes involved in the diversification of human populations into distinct ethnolinguistic groups. Our study reveals that Bantu languages show a latitudinal gradient in covering greater areas with increasing distance from the equator. Analyses suggest that this pattern reflects a true ecological relationship rather than merely being an artefact of shared history. The study shows how a phylogeographic approach can address questions relating to the specific histories of certain groups, as well as general cultural evolutionary processes.
Prehistoric Bantu-Khoisan language contact
Language Dynamics and Change, 2017
Click consonants are one of the hallmarks of “Khoisan” languages of southern Africa. They are also found in some Bantu languages, where they are usually assumed to have been copied from Khoisan languages. We review the southern African Bantu languages with clicks and discuss in what way they may have obtained these unusual consonants. We draw on both linguistic data and genetic results to gain insights into the sociocultural processes that may have played a role in the prehistoric contact. Our results show that the copying of clicks accompanied large-scale inmarriage of Khoisan women into Bantu-speaking communities and took place in situations where the Khoisan communities may have had relatively high prestige. In the Kavango-Zambezi transfrontier region, these events must have occurred at an early stage of the Bantu immigration, possibly because small groups of food producers entering a new territory were dependent on the autochthonous communities for local knowledge.
Bantu-speaker migration and admixture in southern Africa
Human Molecular Genetics, 2020
The presence of Early and Middle Stone Age human remains and associated archeological artifacts from various sites scattered across southern Africa, suggests this geographic region to be one of the first abodes of anatomically modern humans. Although the presence of hunter-gatherer cultures in this region dates back to deep times, the peopling of southern Africa has largely been reshaped by three major sets of migrations over the last 2000 years. These migrations have led to a confluence of four distinct ancestries (San hunter-gatherer, East-African pastoralist, Bantu-speaker farmer and Eurasian) in populations from this region. In this review, we have summarized the recent insights into the refinement of timelines and routes of the migration of Bantu-speaking populations to southern Africa and their admixture with resident southern African Khoe-San populations. We highlight two recent studies providing evidence for the emergence of fine-scale population structure within some South-...
The genetic legacy of the expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples in Africa
With the largest genomic dataset to date of Bantu-speaking populations, including newly generated data of modern-day and ancient DNA from previously unsampled regions in Africa, we shed fresh light on the expansion of peoples speaking Bantu languages that started ∼4000 years ago in western Africa. We have genotyped 1,740 participants, including 1,487 Bantu speakers from 143 populations across 14 African countries, and generated whole-genome sequences from 12 Late Iron Age individuals. Our results show that Bantu speakers received significant gene-flow from local groups in regions they expanded into. We show for the first time that genetic diversity amongst Bantu-speaking populations declines with distance from western Africa, with current-day Zambia and the DRC as possible crossroads of interaction. Using spatially explicit methods and correlating genetic, linguistic and geographical data, we provide cross-disciplinary support for a serial founder migration model. Finally, we discus...
Prehistoric Bantu-Khoisan language contact A cross-disciplinary approach
Click consonants are one of the hallmarks of "Khoisan" languages of southern Africa. They are also found in some Bantu languages, where they are usually assumed to have been copied from Khoisan languages. We review the southern African Bantu languages with clicks and discuss in what way they may have obtained these unusual consonants. We draw on both linguistic data and genetic results to gain insights into the sociocultural processes that may have played a role in the prehistoric contact. Our results show that the copying of clicks accompanied large-scale inmarriage of * BP is grateful to the labex aslan (anr-10-labx-0081) of Université de Lyon for its financial support within the program "Investissements d' Avenir" (anr-11-idex-0007) of the French government, operated by the National Research Agency (anr). HG acknowledges financial support from Ghent University that funds her PhD research. KB is grateful to the Special Research Fund (bof) of Ghent University for financing his research professorship. We furthermore thank Carina Schlebusch and two anonymous reviewers as well as Jeff Good for their insightful comments on a previous version of this manuscript. 2 pakendorf et al. Language Dynamics and Change 7 (2017) 1-46
Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, 2015
In this article, we show that the influence of Khoisan languages on five southwestern Bantu click languages spoken in the Kavango-Zambezi transfrontier area is diverse and complex. These Bantu languages acquired clicks through contact with both Khwe and Ju languages. However, they did not simply copy these Khoisan clicks words. They adapted them phonologically, resulting in a reduction of the click inventory and also integrated them into Bantu morphosyntax through the unusual process of paralexification. What is more, clicks do not only occur in words of Khoisan origin, but also spread to native vocabulary as a language-internal change, among other things through sound symbolism. Finally, calques and head-final nominal compounds in a number of these Bantu languages point to structural influence, most likely from Khwe. We argue that the contact-induced changes observed in the southwestern Bantu languages can be partly accounted for by the language shift of native Khoisan speakers who...
Deep history of cultural and linguistic evolution among Central African hunter-gatherers
Nature human behaviour, 2024
Human evolutionary history in Central Africa reflects a deep history of population connectivity. However, Central African hunter-gatherers (CAHGs) currently speak languages acquired from their neighbouring farmers. Hence it remains unclear which aspects of CAHG cultural diversity results from long-term evolution preceding agriculture and which reflect borrowing from farmers. On the basis of musical instruments, foraging tools, specialized vocabulary and genome-wide data from ten CAHG populations, we reveal evidence of large-scale cultural interconnectivity among CAHGs before and after the Bantu expansion. We also show that the distribution of hunter-gatherer musical instruments correlates with the oldest genomic segments in our sample predating farming. Music-related words are widely shared between western and eastern groups and likely precede the borrowing of Bantu languages. In contrast, subsistence tools are less frequently exchanged and may result from adaptation to local ecologies. We conclude that CAHG material culture and specialized lexicon reflect a long evolutionary history in Central Africa. Recent fossil and genetic findings have revised the origins of Homo sapiens from less than 120,000 years 1 ago to almost half a million years ago 2-5. Genomic analyses have revealed that some of the oldest human lineage divergences are represented by various extant African hunter-gatherer groups (that is, populations that primarily practise a foraging lifestyle for subsistence). Such groups include Khoisan-speaking hunter-gatherer groups in southern and eastern Africa 6-8. In contrast, other studies have postulated that an encapsulation and isolation of Central African hunter-gatherers (CAHGs) from each other 9-11 and gradual intermixing with farming neighbours 12 would have resulted in a shallow cultural history 12-15. Such a view has also been proposed based on their universal adoption of languages from neighbouring farmers, and therefore the absence of a common CAHG language or language family 16,17 (although see refs. 17,18). For example, the 10 CAHG groups in our study (7 western and 3 eastern groups) speak 13 languages from 3 highly differentiated linguistic families that are the product of farming expansions (Fig. 1 and Supplementary Tables 1-3). Recent ecological, genetic and archaeological analyses have cast doubt on this interpretation, revealing various signs of long-term adaptation of CAHGs to current environments and independence from Bantu demographic history. For example, ref. 19 showed that ecological and climatic features of the Congo Basin can successfully predict 120,000 years of hunter-gatherer between-group interconnectivity, genetic exchange and continuous forest occupation. These results are in agreement with archaeological evidence 20 , the deep genetic coalescence of CAHGs with other human lineages 3,21 and identification of
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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 associat...