#khoisan #southafrica #africa
The Khoisan is a collective term to refer to the various huntergatherer indigenous tribes of Southern Africa. They are, in fact, two evolutionarily related but culturally distinct groups of populations that have occupied southern Africa for up to 140,000 years.
These Khoikhoi nations and Sān are grouped under the single term Khoesān as representing the indigenous substrate population of Southern Africa prior to the hypothesised Bantu expansion reaching the area roughly between 1,500 and 2,000 years ago. Many Khoisān peoples are the direct descendants of a very early dispersal of anatomically modern humans to Southern Africa before 150,000 years ago. Some 22,000 years ago, they were the largest group of humans on earth.
The Sān are popularly thought of as foragers in the Kalahari Desert and regions of Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Northern South Africa. The word sān is from the Khoikhoi language and simply refers to foragers ("those who pick things up from the ground") who do not own livestock. As such, it was used in reference to all huntergatherer populations of the Southern African region whom Khoikhoispeaking communities came into contact with and was largely a term referring to a lifestyle, distinct from a pastoralist or agriculturalist one, and not to any particular ethnicity. Today, only about 100,000 Khoisan, who are also known as Bushmen, remain.
They are variously described as the world’s first or oldest people; Africa’s first or oldest people, or the first people of South Africa. Their firstpeople status is due to the fact that they commonly retain genetic elements of the most ancient Homo sapiens.
Origins
It is suggested that the ancestors of the modern Khoisan expanded to southern Africa (from East or Central Africa) before 150,000 years ago, , so that by the beginning of the "megadrought" 130,000 years ago, there were two ancestral population clusters in Africa. They were ancestral to the KhoiSan and bearers of haplogroup L16 in central and eastern Africa ancestral to everyone else. This group gave rise to the San population of huntergatherers. Their nearest living relatives are postulated to be the Hadzabe people from northcentral Tanzania and the Mbuti pygmies from the eastern Congo.
Language
Khoisan languages share click consonants and do not belong to other African language families. For much of the 20th century, they were thought to be genealogically related to each other, but this is no longer accepted. They are now held to comprise three distinct language families and two language isolates.
Their most notable uniting feature is their click consonants. Linguists believe that the more clicks you have, the older the language is, and this one has five, the most of any. They have one of the most complex languages in the world.
Looks
The Khoisan are also lighter in skin color than many of their neighbors, but they do not have European or Asian DNA.
Charles Darwin wrote about the Khoisan and sexual selection in The Descent of Man in 1882, commenting that their steatopygia, seen primarily in females, evolved through sexual selection in human evolution, and that "the posterior part of the body projects in a most wonderful manner."
Most, like East Asians, have epicanthic folds. So do they have Asian DNA? No, it is in fact the other way round. The Khoisan are actually far older than any "Asian DNA". Their ancestors have been inhabiting that part of Africa since before the first migration of H. sapiens out of Africa, which occurred roughly 80,000 years ago or thereabouts. Thus, their DNA predates any haplotype that formed in Asia. So, it is more likely that East Asians have Khoisan DNA rather than Khoisan have East Asian DNA.
The San are ingenious at living off the land, finding water where no one else can and deriving food and medicine from over 1,000 different plants. The Hoodia gordonii cactus, which the San use for hunger suppression and quick energy, is now being used in contemporary weight loss drugs.
Today, the Khoisan struggle to maintain their traditional way of existence, and we are currently witnessing the end of their huntergatherer lifestyle.