Trigger, having issued his caveat about the ‘Hamitic hypothesis’, goes on to propose a model for the ancient occupation of the Nile Valley that some may regard as no less fanciful. He posits an ancient Lower Nubian population of ‘remarkably stable genetic composition’, deriving from ‘a highly successful hunting and gathering population that was widely distributed in the sub-Saharan savanna belt in the sixth millennium BC … that has variously been described as “Caucasoid”, “Sudanese Negro”, or even hesitatingly “Boskopoid”, that is, related to the modern Bushman population of Southern Africa’ (1978a, 29). The term ‘Boskopoid’ is now rejected by palaeoanthropologists and cultural historians (Bonner, 2007; Dubow, 2007), but Trigger’s general point needs attention.
These ‘new’ actors in my unfolding story of north-east African ancestries, the Neolithic hunter-gatherers, were members of Africa’s oldest identifiable surviving population groups, and were speakers of its oldest language phylum, the so-called click languages (Greenberg, 1966; 1981, 306; Blench, 1993b, 133).
These languages and their speakers now only survive as isolates in the arid vastnesses of southern Africa (San Bushmen) and central Tanzania (the Hadzabe and Sandawe), but it is generally agreed that they are the vestiges of a huge cultural, ethnic and linguistic ‘substratum that has all but disappeared’ (Blench, 1993b, 135), yet that before 5000 BCE occupied Africa from its southern shores, throughout its eastern grass and shrub lands, as far north as Eritrea (Murdock, 1959, 170–187; Oliver, 1978, 374–376; Coulson and Campbell, 2001, 30, maps 2 and 3). Their non-Negroid genetic identity can be traced back some 190 000 years (Sykes, 2001; Oppenheimer, 2003), and Spencer Wells says of the survivors of this once ubiquitous people: ‘Genetic data indicate that the San and Hadzabe are among earth’s oldest intact populations’ (2005, n.p.).
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