Early Bantu Expansion from the Cameroon-Nigeria Highlands

Date

c. 1000 BCE

Category

Social & demographic

Region

West-Central Africa (Cameroon/Nigeria highlands)

Era

Ancient Civilizations

Significance

Around the start of the first millennium BCE, communities speaking early Bantu languages, originating in the grassland highlands along the modern Cameroon-Nigeria border, accelerated a centuries-long migration that would carry their languages, farming and (later) ironworking across most of central, eastern and southern Africa.

Proto-Bantu populations had begun diverging into western and eastern streams over the preceding centuries; from roughly 1000 BCE the dispersal gathered pace, spreading yam and later grain cultivation, pottery traditions and village life into the rainforest and savanna zones. Over the following two millennia this became one of the largest population and linguistic expansions in human history, ultimately producing the more than 500 Bantu languages spoken today by hundreds of millions of people. The precise routes, drivers and chronology remain debated and are reconstructed from comparative linguistics, archaeology and, increasingly, genetics, but the expansion is foundational to the demographic and cultural map of sub-Saharan Africa.

Empires active in c. 1000 BCE

• New Kingdom of Egypt
  1550 BCE to 1077 BCE
• Shang Dynasty
  1600 BCE to 1046 BCE
• Hittite Empire
  1650 BCE to 1178 BCE
• Phoenician City-States
  1200 BCE to 539 BCE
• Elamite Kingdom
  2700 BCE to 539 BCE

Related social & demographic events

• Emergence of the Lapita cultural complex in the Bismarck Archipelago
  c. 1500 to 1300 BCE
• Indo-Aryan Migration into South Asia
  c. 1500 BCE
• Plague of Athens
  430 to 426 BCE
• Anatomically modern Homo sapiens appears in Africa
  c. 300,000 years ago
• Antonine Plague
  165-180 CE
• Rise of the Yamnaya Culture and Steppe Pastoralism
  c. 3300 BCE

Essential reading

• Tomb of Fu Hao: An Undisturbed Shang Royal Burial
  c. 1250 BCE
• Invention of Standardised Coinage in Lydia (the Lydian Stater)
  c. 630 BCE
• Senusret III's Nubian campaigns and administrative centralisation
  c. 1850 BCE
• Decline and De-urbanisation of the Indus Civilisation
  c. 1900 BCE

Further reading

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

The wider story

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari

Global best-seller on how our species, its populations and societies remade the world.

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