The Lie of 1652. Patric Tariq Mellet
other markers found at Blombos Cave6 can be divided into a range of early Homo sapiens deposits, and both early and older Homo sapiens sapiens deposits. The deposits of the past 3 000 to 300 years do not necessarily form a continuum of one hominin group from the older past to the present, regardless of the fact that the modes of living relate to different colonies of hunter-gatherers. (The term ‘hominin’ includes modern humans, extinct human species, and all our immediate ancestors.)
It is my perspective that if we want to understand southern African social history, we must be careful not to conflate these different periods. The early European visitors to South Africa used the same lack of differentiation, a recurring theme in South African history, to imply that the Africans they met were a primitive mix of archaic humans and modern humans, which anthropologists called Capoids (a term and concept seldom used today).
European philosophers and historians called their derogatory construct of indigenous Africans of the Cape ‘noble savages’. This was done to pin down the San and Khoe peoples that they met as being ‘uncivilised’ and without any social formation or economy of significance. Europeans casually and in records referred to the San and Khoe as ‘beasts’. This disparaging theme has persisted to this day, and is now often camouflaged by patronising romanticism and attempts to project the San and Khoe as a ‘species branch of humanity’, alternatively as a ‘race’.
Henshilwood and Van Niekerk7 give us a glimpse of the complexities of human evolution in terms of the origins of human behaviour and timelines using the Blombos findings. In a technical overview, McCreery8 illustrates how the Blombos findings are reshaping archaeological understanding of the origins of modern human behaviour and the capabilities of early Homo sapiens and the African Middle Stone Age. This does not change the basics of archaeological science, nor do the early Homo sapiens deposits at archaeological sites negate the other archaeological findings from the past 12 000 to 3 000 years about human social development in southern Africa of the relatively modern ancestors of those to whom we refer as the San, Khoe and Ziwa-Zhizo-Kalanga foundation peoples. The last-mentioned group, who will be discussed in more detail later, was a mix of San, early Khoe and other hunter-herder-farmers who evolved locally from slow migrational drifts identified as the West African Kalundu tradition, the Central African Nkope tradition, and the East African Kwale tradition.9
Mlambo and Parsons10 explain that there is much more complexity to the southern African hominin landscape by elaborating on a range of findings at archaeological sites. These include the Kalambo Falls on the Tanzania–Zambia border, the Matobo Hills sites in Zimbabwe, Tsodilo Hills in Botswana’s northern Kalahari, the Apollo Caves in Namibia, Howieson’s Poort, Klasies River, and Diepkloof in the Eastern Cape, the Sibudu rock shelter in KwaZulu-Natal, the Spoegriver site near the Kai !Gariep river, the Seacow Valley site, Rose Cottage Cave near Lesotho in the Free State, Border Cave on the border of eSwatini (Swaziland), Wilton Farm in the Eastern Cape, Elands Bay near Cape Town, the Pinnacle Point Caves at Mossel Bay, and others. Archaic humans were widely distributed across southern Africa, and indications such as those at Blombos Cave show there were other early Homo sapiens – some genetically related to the San and others not. Mlambo and Parsons show deposits at this entire array of sites linked to sites in Tanzania and sites as far north as Kenya and up to Ethiopia.
This suggests that many earlier migrations from territories north and east of present-day Zimbabwe took place some thousands of years before the events of 3 000 years ago. The earliest first peoples of southern Africa were much more complex and diverse than the picture presented by some of our contemporary discourse that is often stymied by fashionable politics. The authors also look at these movements in relation to huge and landscape-altering climatic conditions, which is a fascinating subject not dealt with in this book. It raises questions about when the populating of areas occurred, if one considers that 4 000 years ago the entire Cape Flats was under seawater, making an island of the mountains of the Cape Peninsula.
Though variations in academic opinion exist on many details, the various social sciences are at one in recognising that the oldest Neolithic societies of southern and East Africa, from Tanzania, Zambia and Angola down to the southernmost point of Africa, Cape Agulhas, were those diverse societies of ancestors of those today generally referred to as San communities. The San family of communities are the survivors of just some of those social groups going back 10 000 years ago. This makes the San communities that still survive in the 21st century the oldest peoples today. Their ancestors also exist in the bloodlines and cultures as hidden foundations for all other African groups in South Africa today, including the various branches of the Khoe peoples who are in part the closest descendent formation largely of the Tshua San and Khwe San, with some Nilotic, sub-Saharan and Cushite herder roots too.
The prehistory period: Genetic perspectives
The field of genetics today complements much of the archaeological and social history research that is at the cutting edge of informing us about the period of 1000 BCE to 1000 CE.
Geneticists conducting a genetic study led by Rebecca Cann11 in 1987 were able to trace back all of humanity living today to a female ancestor who is likely to have lived in northeast Africa about 194 000 years ago, and identified this as the mitochondrial DNA gene type L. Since then this study has become the basis of scientific human-genome tracking studies worldwide.12 The fact that mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is inherited from mothers enables researchers to trace maternal lineage far back in time. The L mtDNA genetic lineage to which all modern humanity (Homo sapiens sapiens) traces back was not the only Homo sapiens group to have existed over the past 300 000 years, nor the only hominin species. But the L lineage and its many offshoots are the only surviving Homo sapiens sapiens.
This early human community with the L mtDNA gene type was small, and lived alongside other Homo sapiens and archaic human species at the time of dispersal across Africa and later into Arabia, Europe, Asia and beyond. Mlambo and Parsons13 point out that the only archaeological remains of this group of modern humans known so far in East Africa is probably a Homo sapiens skull found on the Omo River in Ethiopia, dated about 168 000 years ago.
Approximately 70 000 years ago, at the time of dispersal, those L mtDNA gene type humans are likely to have been a mix of more than one stream of Homo sapiens from across Africa after over 100 000 years of circular migrations on the continent. In all of humanity today mtDNA readings can be proved to go back to this root, and this means that all modern people in their various locations are migrants. Genetics argues that there is only one human race, which evolved in different localities and progressed in different timeframes.
The L mtDNA haplogroup marker is used to track the genetic ancestry of all people today, which is identified in a vast number of descendent haplogroups that geneticists then further refine. (A ‘haplogroup’ represents a group of people who have inherited common genetic characteristics from the same most recent common ancestor going back several thousand years.) Through this process they can track DNA admixture and localities where different peoples resided. Geneticists are also able to track migratory movements as well as admixture between different groups of Homo sapiens over time. Furthermore, they can track admixture with other archaic human groups too. This work shows that there is no pure single line of descent for anyone today, and that migration within Africa resulting in one group of Homo sapiens affecting the DNA of others was a constant over time.
Theories about the geographic origin of Homo sapiens
Various theories have emerged over the past 20 years that have led to debates about where the actual origin of Homo sapiens resides. This has been driven by the questionable notion that there must be one single place to which we can emphatically assign Homo sapiens origin. Some of this thinking is rooted in a constructed racist paradigm in pursuit of a primacy race obsession. Some, erroneously I believe, contrast two single-origin claims by talking competitively of an eastern African origin versus a southern African origin of modern humans.
One version that suggests southern Africa as the place of origin is based on a Stanford University study14 where the geneticists engage in subjective speculation with strong overtones of having been influenced by non-genomic local perspectives of a contemporary quasi-political nature. One cannot be scientifically objective when this occurs. This study, which gave rise to much media speculation, nonetheless makes it very clear that they cannot draw a hard in situ