The chronology of the introduction of pastoralism to the Cape, South Africa

Abstract

A careful survey of reports of early sheep in southernmost Africa combines with new radiocarbon dates to revise our knowledge of early pastoralism in the Cape. The new chronology shows the keeping of domestic stock and the making of pottery are not simultaneous and intertwined but separate events in a more complex history.

Domesticating Animals in Africa: Implications of Genetic and Archaeological Findings

“…This suggests the earliest African sheep were likely thin-tailed varieties. Sheep are the earliest securely dated domesticate in southern Africa, appearing in the late first millennium BC (Sealy and Yates 1994;1996). By the time of Portuguese and Dutch contact with Khoisan speakers of the Cape in the fifteenth century, goats and cattle were in indigenous herds as well (Smith 2008).…”

Changes in Shellfish Species Composition and Mean Shell Size from a Late-Holocene Record of the West Coast of Southern Africa

“…The overall hunter-gatherer dietary mix, as reconstructed from isotopic measurements on skeletons buried along stretches of the west coast and from archaeological food waste, was more marine between 3000 and 2000  than either before or after (Sealy & Van der Merwe, 1988;Lee-Thorp, Sealy & Van der Merwe, 1989;Jerardino, 1996;Jerardino & Yates, 1996). Megamiddens ceased to accumulate about 2000 , apparently coinciding with the arrival of pastoralism to the south-western Cape (Parkington et al, 1988;Sealy & Yates, 1994). The scale of shellfish exploitation was dramatically reduced during the last 2000 years and pre-colonial diet was predominantly of terrestrial origin.…”

Why the Donkey Did Not Go South: Disease as a Constraint on the Spread of Equus asinus into Southern Africa

“…Nevertheless, it shows that donkeys were present in the region in the first millennium BC, in both the Loita Plains of southwestern Kenya and on the southern side of Lake Eyasi in northern Tanzania. The latter area marks the most southerly known extension of Pastoral Neolithic settlement and it is thus to it, or areas nearby, that we need to look for the origin of those groups that introduced cattle, sheep, ancestral forms of the Khoe language family and, perhaps, pottery, to Africa south of the Zambezi in the last few centuries BC (based on dates from Leopard Cave, Namibia, Spoegrivier, South Africa and Toteng, Botswana; Sealy and Yates 1994;Robbins et al 2008;Pleurdeau et al 2012). Gifford-Gonzalez (2000 has demonstrated that a number of serious infectious diseases, including trypanosomiasis, probably handicapped the southward spread of domestic livestock, especially cattle, into East Africa and between East Africa and southern Africa.…”