THEAFRICANS
with confidence a wide range of skills to support themselves in their
chosen, or inherited territories. For some there may have been hard times
when food was short, but rarely would it fail completely. For others life
must have come close to ideal in terms of security.With a million and a half
years of experience behind him man had reached the highest points of
success in the evolution of the hunting-gathering way of life in Southern
Africa."17
The First Farmers
In the sixteenth century A.D., some people in the most arid and most
mountainous parts of Southern Africa were still living as their ancestors
had done, by hunting game and gathering edible plants. Elsewhere to the
west of the twenty-inch rainfall zone, wherever pastures were adequate,
especially in the reliable winter-rainfall area in and near the Cape penin-
sula, people were herding sheep and cattle. These pastoralists were genet-
ically similar to the hunter-gatherers, and their appearance was similar,
except that they were somewhat taller.
East of the twenty-inch rainfall zone lived mixed farmers-people
who
not only owned cattle and sheep but also grew cereal crops and used spears
and digging tools with iron tips. Culturally and physically they resembled