Precolonial History of Angola - Old Stone Age

Old Stone Age

The earliest inhabitants of the Angola area are believed to have been Khoisan hunter-gatherers whose remains date back to the Old Stone Age.

Based on archaeologial and linguistic evidence, scholars believe that beginning in the last centuries BCE, people speaking languages of the Western Bantu family entered the country and introduced agriculture and iron working. Studies of DNA from Cabinda have found no traces of any population groups other than the Bantu in the modern day population. They expected to find evidence of combined ancestry. This makes it difficult to explain the existence of an earlier population, save that they were completely and rapidly replaced by the Bantu speakers without intermarriage (although intermarriage may have occurred in the central parts of Angola). Also, part of the Khoisan withdrew to what is now Southern Angola as well als Northern Botswana and Northern Namibia, where significant groups are still living.

Read more about this topic:  Precolonial History Of Angola

Famous quotes containing the words stone age, stone and/or age:

    Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing. It embodies, indeed, something better than the metaphysics of the Stone Age, namely, as was said, the inherited experience and acumen of many generations of men.
    —J.L. (John Langshaw)

    We’re talking scum here. Air should be illegal if they breathe it.
    Washington, DC, Policeman. quoted by P.J. O’Rourke in Rolling Stone (New York, 30 Nov. 1989)

    Old age equalizes—we are aware that what is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time. When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world.
    Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)