Khoisan
From Freepedia
- This article is about the Khoisan ethnic group. For the Khoisan language group, see Khoisan languages.
Khoisan is the name for several ethnic groups of southern Africa, where they seem to have been present for tens of thousands of years, that share some specific physical and linguistic characteristics. They were the original inhabitants of much of southern Africa before the southward Bantu migrations and later European colonization.
Culturally they are divided into the hunter gatherer San (or Bushmen) and the pastoral Khoi (formerly known as Hottentots). The Khoisan languages are famous for their click consonants.
Over the centuries the Khoisan peoples have been absorbed or displaced by Bantu peoples migrating south in search of new lands, most notably the Xhosa and Zulu, who both have adopted the Khoisan clicks and some loan words. The Khoisan survived in the desert or in areas with winter rains which were not suitable for Bantu crops. During the colonial era they lived in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana, and were massacred to genocidal proportions by Dutch and English settlers. They contributed greatly to the ancestry of South Africa's coloured population.
According to neutral gene analysis, the Khoisan are similar to other sub-Saharan African populations. Physically, however, the Khoisan, with their short frames, yellow-brown skin, "peppercorn" hair, epicanthic eye folds and small arms and feet, are quite distinct from the darker-skinned peoples who constitute the majority of Africa's population. Two distinguishing features of Khoisan women are their elongated labia minora and tendency to steatopygia,[1] features which contributed greatly to the European fascination with the so-called Hottentot Venus. However, the physical differences between Khoisan and other Africans are fading due to intermarriage.
The Khoisan show the largest genetic diversity in mtDNA of all human populations. Y chromosome data also indicates that they were some of the first lineages to branch off of the main human family tree.
Bibliography
- Barnard, Alan (1992) Hunters and Herders of Southern Africa: A Comparative Ethnography of the Khoisan Peoples. New York; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
- Lee, Richard B. (1976), Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers: Studies of the !Kung San and Their Neighbors, Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, eds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
- Lee, Richard B. (1979), The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Smith, Andrew; Malherbe, Candy; Guenther, Mat and Berens, Penny (2000), Bushmen of Southern Africa: Foraging Society in Transition. Athens: Ohio University Press. ISBN 0821413414
