area or last no more than a single year; but sometimes-perhaps
at least
once in a human generation-devastating
droughts hit entire subregions
and persist for as long as a decade. The climate may have been somewhat
moister throughout
the region during the six thousand years before about
4,000
B.C., but since then there do not seem to have been any distinctive
climatic changes.
Most of the region is a plateau, ringed by an escarpment
that runs
parallel to the coast about a hundred miles inland and reaches its greatest
height, more than ten thousand
feet above sea level, in the Drakensberg
range between Natal and Lesotho. No navigable waterways flow through
the region, but the river valleys attracted early human occupation
and
provided early trade routes.
Except in the sheer desert in the far west, the region could support small,
dispersed populations
of hunter-gatherers
with a variety of edible plants
and animals. The region teemed with game-elephants,
rhinoceroses, hip-
popotamuses,
buffalo, lions, leopards, giraffes, zebras, quaggas, and nu-
merous species of antelopes-until
hunters with firearms had cleared
many areas and exterminated several species, including the quaggas, by the
end of the nineteenth
century. Much of the region could also support