kolej-i-drogi: South Africa

Evidence: 45 • authority: 72

Khoisan or Khoesaan ( KOY-sahn) is an umbrella term for the various non-Bantu indigenous peoples of Southern Africa who traditionally speak click languages. Throughout Southern Africa, they are recognized as the historical communities that predate the Bantu expansion and European colonisation. At the time of European contact, Khoisan peoples had the largest populations in areas climatically unfavourable to Bantu sorghum-based agriculture, from the Cape region to Namibia and Botswana, with scattered populations elsewhere in the region, and were soon displaced from areas conducive to European wheat-based agriculture. They consist of two economic groups, the pastoralist Nama and Damara, and th…

Evidence: 44 • authority: 72

The Bantu peoples are an ethnolinguistic grouping of approximately 400 distinct Indigenous African ethnic groups who speak Bantu languages. The languages are native to countries spread over a vast area from West Africa, to Central Africa, Southeast Africa, East Africa and into Southern Africa. Bantu people also inhabit southern areas of Northeast African states. There are several hundred Bantu languages. Depending on the definition of "language" or "dialect", it is estimated that there are between 440 and 680 distinct languages. The total number of speakers is in the hundreds of millions, ranging at roughly 350 million in the mid-2010s (roughly 30% of the population of Africa, or roughly 5%…

Evidence: 38 • authority: 92

Revisiting the African mtDNA landscape through complete mitochondrial genomes.. Africa harbors the richest diversity of mitochondrial DNA lineages, reflecting its central role in human evolutionary history. Early studies of mtDNA variation provided the first genetic evidence for the African origin of modern humans. With complete mitochondrial genome sequencing, we can now reconstruct maternal lineages with high resolution, yet large parts of the continent remain underrepresented. Using a newly developed long-range sequencing assay, we generated 1176 complete mitochondrial genomes from 13 countries across sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on previously understudied regions. We combined these with…

Evidence: 31 • authority: 72

The Griquas are a subgroup of mixed-race heterogeneous Afrikaans-speaking nations in South Africa with a unique origin in the early history of the Dutch Cape Colony. Like the Boers, they migrated inland from the Cape and in the 19th century established several states in what is now South Africa and Namibia. The Griqua consider themselves South Africa’s first multiracial nation with people descended directly from Dutch settlers in the Cape, and local peoples.

Evidence: 31 • authority: 72

Afrikaans is a West Germanic language spoken in South Africa, Namibia, and to a lesser extent Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and also Argentina, where a group in Sarmiento speaks a Patagonian dialect. It emerged during the late 19th century as a fusion of Dutch dialects (mainly Hollandic and Zeelandic) spoken by the Dutch settlers in South Africa since the 17th century and the Dutch-based creole languages spoken by the Khoisan, Nguni and Coloured peoples. Afrikaans is the third most spoken home language in South Africa, out of the country's 12 official languages. In 1996 it was spoken by 14.5% of the population, an estimated 5.9 million people. By 2022 that had fallen to 10.6% (6.3 million peo…

Evidence: 31 • authority: 92

Revisiting the African mtDNA Landscape: A Continental Update from Complete Mitochondrial Genomes. Abstract Africa harbors the richest diversity of mitochondrial DNA lineages, reflecting its central role in human evolutionary history. Early studies of mtDNA variation provided the first genetic evidence for the African origin of modern humans. With complete mitochondrial genome sequencing, we can now reconstruct maternal lineages with high resolution, yet large parts of the continent remain underrepresented. Using a newly developed long-range sequencing assay, we generated 1,288 complete mitochondrial genomes from 14 countries across sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on previously understudied reg…

Evidence: 25 • authority: 72

Egyptians are an ethnic group native to the Nile Valley in Egypt. Egyptian identity is closely tied to geography. The population is concentrated in the Nile Valley, a small strip of cultivable land stretching from the First Cataract to the Mediterranean and enclosed by desert both to the east and to the west. This unique geography has been the basis of the development of Egyptian society since antiquity. The daily language of the Egyptians is a continuum of the local varieties of Arabic; the most famous dialect is known as Egyptian Arabic or Masri. Additionally, a sizable minority of Egyptians living in Upper Egypt speak Sa'idi Arabic. Egyptians are predominantly Muslims, who are in turn ma…

Evidence: 25 • authority: 92

Tracing the Uncharted African Diaspora in Southern Brazil: The Genetic Legacies of Resistance in Two <i>Quilombos</i> from Paraná.. Background/objectives In Brazil, quilombos -African-descendant resistance communities-emerged during slavery and persisted beyond its abolition. The state of Paraná, in Southern Brazil, is home to 86 quilombos , yet their genetic diversity remains entirely unexplored, and little is known about their subcontinental African origins. Methods To explore the demographic history of these communities and the reach of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Southern Brazil, we analyzed Y and mitochondrial DNA haplotypes in samples from two quilombo communities fro…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

The earliest migrations and expansions of archaic and modern humans across continents are believed to have begun approximately 2 million years ago with the early expansions out of Africa by Homo erectus. This initial migration was followed by other archaic humans including H. heidelbergensis, which lived around 500,000 years ago and was the likely ancestor of Denisovans and Neanderthals as well as modern humans. Early hominids had likely crossed land bridges that have now sunk. Within Africa, Homo sapiens dispersed around the time of its speciation, roughly 300,000 years ago. The recent African origin theory suggests that the anatomically modern humans outside of Africa descend from a popul…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

The San peoples (also Saan), or Bushmen, are the members of any of the indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures of southern Africa, and the oldest surviving cultures of the region. Some interpretations of the genetic analysis suggest divergence from other humans as early as 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. Their recent ancestral territories span Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, and South Africa. The San speak, or their ancestors spoke, languages of the Khoe, Tuu, and Kxʼa language families, and can be defined as a people only in contrast to neighboring pastoralists such as the Khoekhoe and descendants of more recent waves of immigration such as the Bantu, Europeans, and South A…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

The Bantu expansion was a major series of prehistoric migrations of the original Proto-Bantu-speaking group, which spread from an original nucleus around West-Central Africa across Central Africa, Eastern Africa, and Southern Africa. In the process, the Proto-Bantu-speaking settlers absorbed, displaced, and possibly in some cases replaced pre-existing hunter-gatherer and pastoralist groups that they encountered. There is linguistic evidence for this expansion – a great many of the languages which are spoken across sub-Equatorial Africa are remarkably similar to each other, suggesting a recent common cultural origin of their original speakers. The linguistic core of the Bantu languages, whic…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

Bantu-speaking people of South Africa are the majority, ethno-linguistic people of South Africa. They are indigenous southern Africans from Southern Bantu-speaking peoples; whose earliest presence through surviving evidence, in the now "South Africa", is noted between 350 BCE and 300 CE from either the speculated prehistoric migrations called Bantu expansion (5000 BCE to 500 CE), or due to localized back and forth seasonal migratory culture(s) based on shifting cultivation. They are referred to in various census as African, Black, or Native South African.