After about 4000 BP, populations grew substantially, and the interior of South Africa was re-occupied. In areas where detailed studies have been done, notably the Eastern and Western Cape Provinces and the Thukela River Basin of KwaZulu-Natal, we can see that lower-ranked food sources were added to the diet, including freshwater fish and shellfish, and there was greater emphasis on plant foods. Hilary Deacon has suggested that people may have practiced ‘fire-stick farming’ - burning the veld to promote the growth of geophytes, whose starchy corms were an important food item. These are just the type of changes one would expect if there were more people needing to be fed. In at least some areas, growing population density led to competition for resources, the emergence of more settled, territorial lifestyles and, no doubt, restructuring of earlier networks of trade and communication. At the same time, we also see evidence of increasing regional differentiation in artifact-making traditions. At some sites, microlithic tool-kits persisted, while at others, they were replaced by macro-lithic assemblages. In a broad sense, this variation is likely to be one facet of the greater social and economic complexity of the last few millennia, but there is still much to explore in the links between material culture, economy, and identity (see Africa, South: Interaction of Farmers, Herders, and Foragers; Kalahari Margins).
These groups may not have been ‘foragers’ in the strict Binfordian sense. Storage pits, a feature of sites in the southern and Eastern Cape in the last few millennia, point to elements of delayed return strategies. Those pits whose contents are preserved seem to have been used mainly to store the oil-rich fruits of Pappea capensis. It is unclear just how economically important these were - the fruit is edible, but the oil was also used as a cosmetic, which may have been its main use. In the Eastern Cape, infants and young children who died were sometimes richly endowed with grave goods, especially ostrich eggshell beads. Simon Hall and Johan Binneman have suggested that these items may have been given in gift exchanges, and/or they may indicate a degree of ascribed status. These features hint at emerging complexity among Late Holocene hunter-gatherers in more productive environments.
Mid - and Late Holocene hunter-gatherers were physically similar to their recent Khoisan descendants: small, lightly built people at the most gracile end of the range of documented human variation. Why this should be so is something of a mystery. It has been suggested that recent Kalahari foragers were short in stature because populations had had to adapt to scarce resources, but this clearly does not apply to equally small populations in resource-rich areas of the subcontinent; it is, therefore, probably not a major factor in the Kalahari either. People were particularly short between 4000 and 3000 BP, for reasons that are not yet well understood, but are likely to be linked to competition and conflict associated with increasing population density and the drive to intensify production. Examination of Late Holocene human skeletons has yielded remarkably little evidence of disease or trauma. Accidents or falls that resulted in broken bones or other injuries to the skeleton seem to have been rare. There are a few documented cases of interpersonal violence, all of which date to the third millennium before present - perhaps also related to conflicts to do with the re-configuration of society at that time.
Overall, emerging reconstructions of Late Holocene hunter-gatherers indicate a dynamic society, with different trajectories in different regions. As in late hunter-gatherer communities in other parts of the world, there is evidence of ‘intensification’; there is no way of knowing whether this might eventually have developed into domestication, if food production had not been imported into the region.
Saw the first iron-using agriculturists, who also kept sheep and cattle, move in during the first few centuries AD. Relations between food producers and foragers were complex, with evidence of interaction ranging across the spectrum from cooperation to clientship to conflict. In time, independent foragers were largely excluded from regions settled by farmers, although they continued to live until very recently in less contested areas.
See also: Africa, Central: Great Lakes Area; Africa, East: Foragers; Africa, South: Interaction of Farmers, Herders, and Foragers; Kalahari Margins; Hunter-Gatherers, Ancient.
World History
