3000 BCE to 300 CE · Africanspan
The Bantu expansion carries one language family across a third of Africa
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Between 3000 BCE and 300 CE farming reached nearly all the land on earth that would support it, and everywhere it arrived it brought the same consequences for population, settlement and social organisation. In Africa the largest instance is the spread of speakers of Bantu languages, a subgroup of Niger-Congo, across most of the southern third of the continent. It began in the Cameroon and Nigeria borderlands, crossed the equatorial rainforest and came out onto the savannas of eastern and southern Africa. It stands beside the Austronesian settlement of the Pacific, the Indo-European spread across Eurasia and the Turkic spread across Central Asia as one of the great demographic movements in human history. The engine in each case was the same. Food production allowed population growth, population growth allowed territorial expansion, and expansion carried language, technique and custom into new country.
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