GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

HOW AFRICA BECAME BLACK • 3 9 3
Swahili trading settlements and picked up a pilot who guided him on that
direct route to India.
But there was an equally vigorous sea trade from India eastward,
between India and Indonesia. Perhaps the Austronesian colonists of Madagascar
reached India from Indonesia by that eastern trade route and then
fell in with the westward trade route to East Africa, where they joined
with Africans and discovered Madagascar. That union of Austronesians
and East Africans lives on today in Madagascar's basically Austronesian
language, which contains loan words from coastal Kenyan Bantu languages.
But there are no corresponding Austronesian loan words in
Kenyan languages, and other traces of Austronesians are very thin on the
ground in East Africa: mainly just Africa's possible legacy of Indonesian
musical instruments (xylophones and zithers) and, of course, the Austronesian
crops that became so important in African agriculture. Hence
one wonders whether Austronesians, instead of taking the easier route to
Madagascar via India and East Africa, somehow (incredibly) sailed
straight across the Indian Ocean, discovered Madagascar, and only later
got plugged into East African trade routes. Thus, some mystery remains
about Africa's most surprising fact of human geography.
WHAT CAN ARCHAEOLOGY tell us about the other great population
movement in recent African prehistory—the Bantu expansion? We saw
from the twin evidence of modern peoples and their languages that sub-
Saharan Africa was not always a black continent, as we think of it today.
Instead, this evidence suggested that Pygmies had once been widespread in
the rain forest of Central Africa, while Khoisan peoples had been widespread
in drier parts of subequatorial Africa. Can archaeology test those
assumptions?
In the case of the Pygmies, the answer is "not yet," merely because
archaeologists have yet to discover ancient human skeletons from the Central
African forests. For the Khoisan, the answer is "yes." In Zambia, to
the north of the modern Khoisan range, archaeologists have found skulls
of people possibly resembling the modern Khoisan, as well as stone tools
resembling those that Khoisan peoples were still making in southern Africa
at the time Europeans arrived.
As for how the Bantu came to replace those northern Khoisan, archaeological
and linguistic evidence suggest that the expansion of ancestral