ic pursuits. When Europeans arrived in Southern Africa, they found that
the pastoralists were not as adept in music and rock painting and engraving
as the hunter-gatherers.
According to Elphick's reconstruction, the herding way of life spread by
migratory drift and cultural transmission from the nuclear area in northern
Botswana, where the first Southern African aborigines probably obtained
livestock from herders further north. The initial direction of the expansive
process would have been southward to the middle reaches of the Orange
River. One segment would then have moved westward to split near the
mouth of the Orange, whence some chiefdoms would have moved south-
ward and others northward along the Atlantic coastline. The other segment
may have moved southward to reach the Indian Ocean in the vicinity of the
Fish River and thence westward to the Cape peninsula.
As some such process occurred, complex interactions would have taken
place. In some cases, aboriginal hunters may have accommodated to the
intrusion of the first herders into their territories; but, as we know from
reports by literate Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
when the herders and their livestock seemed to threaten their control of the