Answer to Question #316368 in History for Edward

Question

Outline the expansion of the Bantu’s

Answer 1

The primary evidence for this expansion is linguistic – a great many of the languages which are spoken across Sub-Equatorial Africa are remarkably similar to each other, suggesting the common cultural origin of their original speakers.

Bantu languages are generally thought to have originated approximately 5000 years ago (ya) in the Cameroonian Grassfields area neighbouring Nigeria, and started to spread, possibly together with agricultural technologies , through Sub-Saharan Africa as far as Kenya in the east and the Cape in the south. The dispersal of Bantu languages in Sub-Saharan Africa was coupled with the movement of people (demic diffusion) or whether it was the result of language shift. The genetic distances among Bantu populations with those of Bantu versus all other linguistic and ethnic groups indicates that even geographically distant Bantu-speaking populations are closely related to each other, as expected with demic diffusion, and argues against a major role for language shift in the Bantu expansion.