ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION The antiquity of the Homo sapiens in Southern Africa1 goes back at least 80-100,000 years as indicated by the discoveries of human remains which include the archaeological finding made in 1974 at Border Cave (kwaZulu) (21, pp.212-15). No evidence has been found for the presence of the Neanderthals or “Neanderthaloids” in the southern sub-continent or, for that matter, in Africa south of the Sahara. Instead the population is typified by an early Homo sapiens variant with some Khoisan-Negro affinities. It developed a relatively advanced Stone Age technology and economy indicated by the presence of specialised tools and the intense exploitation of marine resources (4, p.416).A pertinent question arises - what were the conditions of life and the related distribution of the early populations of Southern Africa during the last glacial period? The important fact is that unlike during some previous periods of glaciation the sub-continent was not covered with ice, but climatic changes which took place on a large scale strongly influenced vegetation, human, and animal life. The last glacial maximum, with its cold and dry climate, occurred about 18,000 years ago. At that time, there were no significant changes in seasonal distribution of rainfall as compared with that of the present, but changes in total annual rainfall were considerable. The relevant archeological evidence has produced few traces of the population of hunter-gatherers, the ancestors of the San of Southern Africa, who depended for their subsistence on the natural environment. A visible change took place with the coming of the present interglacial epoch, some 12,000 years ago. Between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago, the largest increase in human population took place,
when the climatic optimum led to greater productivity of environments. Subsequendy, there was some deterioration in the conditions of life. An instance of extremely unfavourable conditions is found in the Transvaal highveld, where hunter-gatherer population was absent between 8,000 and 2,000 years ago, i.e. until the arrival of the Iron Age agriculturalists (16, pp.325-7).Iron Age farmers, who practised shifting cultivation, contributed to the destruction of the original dry forest and shrub. Grazing herds also played a role in modifying plant cover. O f particular significance was the impact of grass fires both man-induced and natural. The age-old practice of grass-burning had been noticed by Vasco da Gama who, in 1497, because of the dense smoke seen along the coast of the south-western Cape, called it Terra de Fume. Grass burning had been used already in prehistoric times against wild animals, for hunting purposes, and later on by pastoralists to induce the growth of grass. Subsequently European immigrants adopted the methods of the local inhabitants in order to increase the utilisation of natural pasture. Seasonal burning has undoubtedly been an ecological factor of considerable importance for a very long time. Its effects were manifold: the most important was an adjustment in plant species, as only fire resistant trees and shrubs could survive; second, a reduction in the formation of humus, the lowering of the soil pH; and third, an increase in soil erosion caused by the seasonal disappearance of plant cover (45,pp.166-8).The results of recent studies have radically altered our views on the pace and the nature of the long-term ecological change. The older ‘wilderness model’, relying on the reconstruction of the Southern African flora in AD 1400 by J.P.H. Ackocks, assumed that, at that time, the environmental impact of the Iron Age farmers and pastoralists was insignificant in comparison with the role played by commercial cultivation and livestock-rearing of the colonial period (1, passim). A number of subsequent archeo-botanical investigations carried out in various parts of the region point to far-reaching modifications in the plant cover during the last two thousand years. The presently existing forests are only a remnant of the earlier Holocene biome. While the higher lying areas were probably covered with grasslands, the valleys and coastal plains, on the other hand, were overgrown with woodlands which were removed prior to the arrival of the whites. In eastern Botswana floral characteristics of certain locations allowed them to be identified with the Iron Age middens dating back to the ninth and the thirteenth centuries. Similar detective work has been done by archeologists in the Transvaal lowveld where the presence of Acacia indicated early village sties. In Zululand, as well, woodlands dominated by Euclea divinorum had replaced the original forests
felled in the pre-colonial period as the result of extensive iron-smelting activities (35, p.12). The appearance of secondary savanna and the shrub encroachment following the cessation of cultivation are, as a rule, tangible evidence of Iron Age occupation (29, pp. 150-1).Vegetation is also affected by significant changes in humidity, whether represented by alternating long periods of wet and dry climate (pluvials and interpluvials) extending over centuries or even millenia, or the shorter term year-to-year variations in weather conditions.It goes without saying that vegetational patterns have been formed over thousands of years as a result of slow changes. They have also been modified by man’s interference. Thus the present plant cover cannot be considered as entirely ‘natural’ and the landscape which is seen today may be mainly anthropogenic. EARLY IRON AGE (EIA): BANTU MIGRATIONS AND ECONOMICCHANGE Prior to the great movement of the Bantu-speaking agriculturalists from the north, Southern Africa was inhabited solely by the San and Khoi peoples.2 In contrast to the immigrant black-skinned Bantu-speakers, the San and the Khoi were yellow-skinned and their languages were related. The San came from East Africa in the distant past. The penetration of the Bantu, who arrived long before the coming of the first European setders in the seventeenth century, initiated the Southern African Iron Age. The spread and growth of Bantu-speaking groups among the local Khoisan peoples3 was gradual and largely peaceful, unlike the rapid movement of die Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which was often accompanied by armed conflict. Whereas the Bantu-speaking people brought with them the benefits of the African Iron Age to die Late Stone Age population, the impact of European technology had a traumatic and disruptive effect on the indigenous peoples.The beginnings of the dynamic process of migrations of the proto-Bantu speakers throughout sub-Saharan Africa can be traced to the original setdements in Cameroun and neighbouring Nigeria around 1,000 BC or even earlier. It was a movement of neolithic population which had left traces of pottery, ground stone artifacts and grindstones, made use of oil palm and consumed fruit of Canarium schweinfurthii. It is important to note that the Western Bantu did not cultivate cereals (82, p.132). Subsequendy, as these migrants moved further to the south they began to grow yams on the forest fringes and clearings. Their food supply, which was complemented by hunting and gathering, allowed for population growth.
