However, in the 1990s, some scholars began to question the idea that Bantu languages and skills spread through migration. Couldn’t these cultural habits have spread as people stayed in the same place and hunter-gatherer communities passed new technologies, languages and habits among themselves?
Genetic techniques that could analyze human ancestry helped resolve this debate. We all share DNA with our relatives: an average of 50 percent with siblings, 12.5 percent with cousins, 3.3 percent with second cousins, and so on. Although these proportions become smaller the further back in time a common ancestor is, statistical techniques can detect patterns.
In fact, a genetic analysis of 2,432 Africans in 2009 found that Bantu-speaking people from western, central and southern Africa are much more closely related to each other than one would expect given their geographical distance. And in 2024, a team of scientists analyzed the genomes of 1,763 Africans and found the greatest genetic diversity among Bantu speakers in West Africa. As distance from the region increased, diversity decreased. “This is a typical feature of a population expanding from one place to another,” explains co-author Carina Schlebusch, a geneticist at Uppsala University in Sweden.
Approximately 350 million people in sub-Saharan Africa speak one of approximately 500 Bantu languages, from Swahili in East Africa to Xhosa in Southern Africa.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
Approximately 350 million people in sub-Saharan Africa speak one of approximately 500 Bantu languages, from Swahili in East Africa to Xhosa in Southern Africa.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
Mysterious roots
But while linguistic and genetic data suggest that West Africa – particularly the Grassfields region of Cameroon – is the homeland of the Bantu, there is little conclusive archaeological evidence. At the best-studied archaeological site in the Grassfields, a rock shelter called Shum Laka, ceramic fragments dating from 7,000 to 6,000 years ago, which were abundant 5,000 to 4,000 years ago, appear. Bowls and jars, initially simply decorated with incisions and stamps and later bearing the marks of carved or woven tools rolled over wet clay, are a possible but inconclusive trace of Bantu ancestry.
South of Cameroon, archaeologists have been searching for artifacts in one of the Bantu-speaking people’s first travel destinations: the rainforest of the Congo. Between 2010 and 2023, archaeologist Alexandre Livingstone Smith from the Belgian Royal Museum for Central Africa traveled by boat along the Congo several times as part of a team led by linguist Birgit Ricquier. In a number of villages, Smith found pottery shards that were consistent in style with those found further west and dated to 2,300 to 2,000 years ago. “These would be the potential first Bantu settlers of the forest,” says Smith.
