San people emerge as one of Earth’s oldest surviving cultures in southern Africa

Story: 10000 B.C.E.  |  Last updated: January 7, 0001

Around 10,000 B.C.E., communities ancestral to the San peoples had spread across a vast arc of the continent — from what is now Tanzania, Zambia, and Angola, south all the way to Cape Agulhas at Africa’s tip. They were hunter-gatherers moving through grasslands, shrublands, and coasts, carrying with them languages built on click consonants, deep ecological knowledge, and spiritual traditions that would endure for millennia. Their story is not a beginning so much as a flowering — of one of the oldest human lineages on the planet.

Key findings

• San people southern Africa: By around 10,000 B.C.E., communities ancestral to the San had spread from East Africa as far south as Cape Agulhas, making them among the earliest peoples to inhabit the southern tip of the continent.
• Genetic divergence: Some analyses of ancient and modern DNA suggest San lineages diverged from other human populations as early as 100,000 to 200,000 B.C.E. — placing them among the deepest-rooted branches of the human family tree.
• Hunter-gatherer cultures: The San were semi-nomadic, moving seasonally in defined areas guided by water sources, game, and plant foods — a mode of life that also gave them the mobility to spread faster than herder or farming cultures.

Who the San are

The San — also called Bushmen, though many individuals and communities find that term offensive — have no single collective name in their own languages. They identify by nation: the Juǀʼhoansi, the ǀxam, the Gǁana and Gǀui, the Haiǁom, and many others. The word “San” itself comes from a Khoekhoe term meaning roughly “people who pick things up from the ground” — originally a description of foraging, later used pejoratively. Representatives of San communities stated in 2003 that they prefer to be called by their individual group names wherever possible.

Today, the largest concentrations of San peoples live in Botswana, home to roughly 63,500 San as of 2017 C.E., and Namibia, where a 2023 C.E. census counted over 71,000. Their ancestral territories stretched across Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, and South Africa.

A living thread through deep time

What makes the San peoples’ story so remarkable is its continuity. Scholarly consensus holds that modern San communities descend from the oldest Neolithic societies of southern and East Africa. Genetic studies have consistently placed San lineages at or near the root of the human family tree — not as a curiosity, but as evidence of an unbroken thread of human life stretching back further than almost any other living population.

This depth of lineage is visible in language, too. The Khoe, Tuu, and Kxʼa language families spoken by San communities feature click consonants — sounds found in very few other language families — that linguists believe may represent some of the oldest phonological features in human speech.

Across the region, the San were not isolated. They engaged with migrating herder groups who would later become the Khoekhoe, and with Bantu-speaking farming communities who moved southward during the Bantu expansion between roughly 2,000 B.C.E. and 1,000 C.E. At Mapungubwe, one of southern Africa’s earliest kingdoms, San shamans were called upon for rainmaking — entering trance states to enter the spirit world and summon the animals associated with rain. Scholars have suggested that the San played a role in the spiritual foundations of Mapungubwe, and the subsequent states of Great Zimbabwe, Thulamela, and the Mutapa Empire.

Knowledge written in stone and land

The San left a vast record in the landscape. Tsodilo Hills in northern Botswana — a UNESCO World Heritage Site — contains some 4,500 rock paintings, many attributed to San artists over thousands of years. The images are not mere decoration; they are understood by researchers to encode cosmological knowledge, trance experiences, and social memory.

Rock art attributed to San peoples appears across southern Africa, from the Drakensberg mountains to the Namibian desert. It represents one of the longest continuous artistic traditions anywhere on Earth.

The San’s ecological knowledge was equally profound. Moving semi-nomadically across diverse biomes, they developed detailed understanding of animal behavior, plant medicinal properties, weather patterns, and seasonal ecology. That knowledge was passed orally across generations — much of it still alive in San communities today. Genetic research published in recent years has continued to refine the picture of San origins, consistently affirming their position as one of the earliest-diverging human lineages.

Lasting impact

The San peoples’ contribution to human history is difficult to overstate, even if it has been systematically undervalued by mainstream narratives. As one of the oldest surviving cultures on Earth, their languages, spiritual practices, ecological knowledge, and social structures represent a living archive of how humans navigated the world for hundreds of thousands of years.

Their mobility and intimate knowledge of southern African ecosystems meant they arrived at the continent’s southern tip long before herder or farming cultures. When the Khoe and Xhosa peoples moved into the Eastern Cape after 650 C.E., and into the Western Cape after 1,000 C.E., many San moved from coastal areas into the interior — an adaptive response that, in a painful irony, would repeat across centuries of displacement.

Contemporary genetics owes a profound debt to San communities. Studies of San genomes have helped scientists reconstruct early human migration patterns, identify ancient population divergences, and understand the deep structure of human genetic diversity. San individuals have participated in landmark genomic studies, sometimes shaping how science understands the origins of all living humans.

The ongoing advocacy of San peoples for land rights, cultural recognition, and self-determination is also part of the legacy — a refusal, across millennia of pressure, to disappear.

Blindspots and limits

The archaeological and genetic record of San origins is still being refined. The ~10,000 B.C.E. date for the regional spread across southern Africa reflects one well-supported data point, but earlier San presence in parts of the region is likely, and the picture grows more complex as new sites are excavated. Much of what we know about San history was recorded by outsiders — European anthropologists and colonial-era researchers — whose frameworks sometimes distorted or oversimplified deeply varied cultures. The very term “San” is a partial solution to a naming problem that communities are still navigating. The internal diversity of San peoples — dozens of distinct nations, languages, and traditions — risks being flattened when telling this story as a single thread.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Wikipedia — San people

For more from Good News for Humankind, see:

• Indigenous land rights: 160 million hectares recognized at COP30
• Uganda’s rhino reintroduction in Kidepo Valley
• The Good News for Humankind archive on prehistory

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