Ancestral origins

South Africa

In 1999, UNESCO added three paleo-archaeological sites to its World Heritage list. Situated in South Africa, these offer crucial evidence into the origins of our species, for their artefacts show that early hominids began living in Southern Africa more than three million years ago and that human ancestors domesticated fire more than a million years in our past (UNESCO, 1999). In northwest South Africa, the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site (2020) claims that our ‘collective umbilical cord lies buried’ in Africa, where the earliest hominids emerged about seven million years ago, invented stone tools more than two million years ago, and evolved into modern humans around 200000 BCE. Although archaic humans, such as the Neanderthal, have been found in other parts of the world, the genetic and fossil evidence points to an African genesis of anatomically modern humans (Relethford 2008). As genetic findings indicate a degree of interhominin mixing, modern human ancestry is mostly, although not entirely, African in origin.

Given its placement at the confluence of two oceans, Southern Africa is a biodiverse and heterogeneous land. Khoekhoe and Sān peoples comprise its original inhabitants (Besten, 2009). Among the most diverse peoples on earth, the gather-hunter Sān historically lived in ethnically defined areas, where they moved according to the seasons in symbiosis with water, plant, and animal life. Sān societies spoke numerous unrelated languages, some of which remain in use (Barnard, 2019). Khoekhoe societies either displaced or broke away from the Sān around 2,300 years ago when these peoples accepted animal husbandry as a way of life (Smith, 2009).