Genetic evidence strongly supports the idea that Bantu languages, technologies, and cultural practices spread through the migration of Bantu-speaking populations rather than solely through cultural exchange among communities that remained in place. Studies of thousands of African genomes point to western Africa as the source of a population expansion, while archaeological work is beginning to identify possible early Bantu settlements but has yet to provide conclusive proof.
By the 1990s, some scholars had begun questioning the long-standing view that Bantu languages and technologies spread primarily through migration. They asked whether cultural practices might instead have moved between neighboring hunter-gatherer communities, with people passing on new techniques, languages, and customs while remaining in the same regions.
Genetic methods, including methods for analyzing people’s ancestry, helped resolve some of the debate. People share DNA with their relatives: siblings share an average of 50 percent, cousins 12.5 percent, and more distant relatives about 3.3 percent. Although these percentages decline as the shared ancestor lived further in the past, statistical analysis can still reveal patterns of relatedness across populations.
In 2009, a genetic analysis of 2,432 Africans found that Bantu-speaking populations in western, central, and southern Africa were more closely related than would be expected from their geographic separation. In 2024, another team analyzed the genomes of 1,763 Africans. The researchers found that Bantu speakers in West Africa had the greatest genetic diversity, with diversity declining as the distance from that region increased.
“This is a typical feature of population expansion from one place to another,” said co-author Karina Schlebusch, a geneticist at Uppsala University in Sweden.
Mysterious roots
Although linguistic and genetic evidence identifies the Grassfields region of western Africa, particularly Cameroon, as the homeland of the Bantu people, conclusive archaeological evidence remains limited. At the Grassfields’ best-studied site, a rock shelter called Shum Raka, archaeologists have found pottery fragments dating from 7,000 to 6,000 years ago. The pottery became more abundant between 5,000 and 4,000 years ago. Early bowls and jars were simply decorated with incisions and stamps; later examples may show carvings or impressions made by rolling tools across wet clay.
However, these artifacts contain no conclusive traces of Bantu ancestry.
In southern Cameroon, archaeologists have searched for artifacts in the Congo rainforest, one of the first destinations of Bantu-speaking populations. Several times between 2010 and 2023, Alexandre Livingston-Smith, an archaeologist at the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Belgium, traveled by boat along the Congo River as part of a team led by linguist Birgit Rikkier.
In many villages, Livingston-Smith found pottery sherds dating from 2,300 to 2,000 years ago. Their style was consistent with pottery found farther west. “That would be the first potential Bantu forest settlers,” Smith said.
Source: arstechnica.com
