The prehistoric migration that gave rise to much of Africa’s people, including most of the ancestors of black Brazilians, began about 5,000 years ago and followed a route through the tropical forests of the continent’s center, a new study says.
The result comes from an analysis of the kinship patterns between more than 400 languages of the Bantu linguistic branch, today present in a huge area that goes from Cameroon, on the Atlantic coast, to Kenya and Tanzania, on the coast of the Indian Ocean. The area also covers South Africa and Namibia, in the extreme south, and Congo and Angola, in the central region of the continent.
In all these regions, the predominant languages have many similarities, both in vocabulary and in grammatical structure, more or less in the same way that it is possible to detect many commonalities between Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French and others. languages descended from Latin.
Taking this into account, it is natural to assume that the Bantu languages descended from a common ancestor that spread across the African continent millennia ago. Archaeological and DNA data suggest that this expansion is likely associated with the great agricultural and technological capabilities of speakers of this language group in the past.
The Bantu seem to have mastered iron metallurgy on their own, for example. In addition, they developed efficient methods of tropical agriculture, growing tubers such as yams and grains such as millet and millet. The idea is that this agricultural-technological package has helped these groups to colonize new regions more efficiently, displacing other peoples or mixing with them.
The question, however, is how and when the journey would have taken place, and that is the subject of the new study, coordinated by Ezequiel Koile of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.
Together with colleagues from Russia, the USA and New Zealand, Koile developed a series of statistical methods to try to estimate how the languages of the Bantu group diversified over time, taking into account changes in the form of the words they share. each other.
One of the doubts, taking into account both linguistic and archaeological and genetic data, is whether the Bantu would have had to “wait” for a relatively drier moment in the African climate system, around 2,500 years ago, to expand far beyond their original home, which was probably in Cameroon.
This proposal arose because the main crops of these peoples at the time were more appropriate for savannah regions, drier and with more open vegetation. However, before 2,500 years ago, it is estimated that the central strip of the African continent, which is still home to the most humid and dense tropical and equatorial forests, was much more extensive and continuous.
For some experts, this would have stopped the expansion of the Bantu until the moment when the decrease in rainfall led to the opening of a “corridor” of open vegetation in the valley of the Sangha River (a tributary of the Congo River). Another possibility is that, instead of following this corridor, the Bantu would have adopted a coastal route, passing through places on the Atlantic coast where there was also less dense vegetation.
The extensive linguistic analysis coordinated by Koile, however, indicates that the separation between the main branches of the Bantu language family took place long before the opening of the savanna corridor, and also did not coincide with the coastal route. Their estimate is that the expansion of these peoples would have reached the tropical forests of Central Africa around 4,500 years ago, well before the transformation of these forests brought about by drought.
The idea, therefore, is that the Bantu would have been able to use diversified strategies to occupy the forests, either by choosing areas of slightly less dense vegetation to plant, taking advantage of the riverbanks or complementing their agricultural subsistence with hunting and gathering. These would be methods not very different from the populations of indigenous farmers who occupied the Amazon at about the same time.
The results of this process also left important marks on the DNA, culture and language of Brazilians. It turns out that seven out of ten of the enslaved Africans sent here over the course of three centuries came from Angola and Congo, regions with a Bantu population. Very common words in Portuguese spoken in Brazil, such as “moleque” and “mouse”, derive from the languages of this family.
The study appeared in this week’s issue of the National Academy of Sciences’ journal PNAS.
