Re: Khoisan is very old

Darkstar wrote:

In other words, you mean there are archeological and historical facts
confirming that Bushmen were farmers in the past, and then they took
out their bows and reverted to hunting again? They are not
prehistorical hunter/gatherers but farmers like Bantu?

Hunting/gathering is certainly an old way of life, if not the oldest.
Ancient rock paintings can easily testify to hunting/gathering being
"archaic". But that doesn't mean that it's a permanent way of life,
nor is it necessary to assume that those people who at one point live
as mainly hunter-gathererers must have done so since the beginning of
time. People can change and mix their life styles quite easily. It's
not a fixed condition.

That was my (main) point. I didn't want to imply that the Khoisan-
speakers were formerly farmers. Many of them have been pastoralists at
some point in history, but presumably not farmers. The main problem
with sub-Saharan history is that anything before, say, 1500 is mainly
conjecture. There are archaeological data, true, but equating
archaeological finds with ethnicities and languages is both
speculative and difficult (even impossible).

Nowadays, few Khoisan-speakers are actually hunter/gatherers. Most of
them live either in towns or on farms.

Worth pointing out is the fact that Khoisan-speaking peoples do not
form any natural unit, neither linguistically nor anthropologically.
The Khoisan-speking peoples comprise a heterogenous collection of
several separate groups of peoples. They speak unrelated languages and
do not form any cultural unit, neither now nor at any known time in
history.

Besides, the large majority of all known Khoisan-speaking peoples have
been pastoralists, not hunter-gatherers, ever since they were first
recorded by the early Dutch at the Cape. The so-called Bushmen form
only a small minority within the artificially created grouping
"Khoisan".

Still, if we were to disregard all that for the sake of argument, and
assume that the Khoisan-speaking hunter/gatherers would have been
hunter/gatherers ever since the beginning of time (again, for the sake
of argument only), then you would still not be able to conclude from
that, by any known reputable methodology, that click sounds (a
structural feature of their languages) would be archaic, too.

---
jfm

.

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