here - 5th International Conference on Bantu Languages

An abstract for WS3: New Interdisciplinary perspectives on Bantu Expansion
Cultural phylogeography of the Bantu Expansion
Thomas E. Currie
Human Evolutionary Ecology Group, Department of Anthropology, UCL, UK
t.currie@ucl.ac.uk
WS3
T<strong>here</strong> is disagreement about the routes taken by early populations speaking Bantu languages as they
expanded to cover much of sub-Saharan Africa. Here I use lexical data and Bayesian phylogenetic
methods to build trees showing the historical relationships between Bantu languages. We then explicitly
map these trees onto geographical space in order to assess the most likely pathway of expansion and
test between dispersal scenarios. The results clearly support a scenario in which groups first moved
south through the rainforest from a homeland somew<strong>here</strong> near the Nigeria-Cameroon border. Emerging
the other side one branch moved south and west. Another branch moved towards the Great Lakes,
eventually giving rise to the monophyletic clade of East Bantu languages that inhabit East and South-
Eastern Africa. These analyses highlight the benefits that computational methods can have in making
assumptions about classification schemes explicit, and providing quantitative assessments of competing
ideas. I will discuss the role that these spatially-explicit phylogenies can play in testing further specific
hypotheses about Bantu prehistory, as well as the general ecological processes involved in the
diversification of human populations in to distinct ethnolinguistic groups.