What would a Bronze/Iron civilization arising in South Africa look like?

I actually know a person who has tried ostrich egg. He stated it was definitely an interesting experience.

And the meat is as good as beef, much mre red than most other fowl. I fully expect the US food industry to offer pre-fabricated ostrurduckens by 2025.
 
That last needs to be investigated for its possibility. Back in the 1970s there was a quasi scifi novel based on the idea of Carthaginian migrants fleeing to southern Africa instead of being massacred or enslaved by the Romans. Lets imagine the Phonicians establsihing a series of trading posts along the African coasts, then there are Carthaginian refugees moving into those enclaves. If the dice roll correctly enuogh of the these enclaves propsper & aseries of mixed San, Khoisan, Mediterranean cultures expand metal working, agriculture, writing, pottery, shipbuilding, ect... South of the desert region, & up the east coast.

And this novel is called?
 
And this novel is called?

"The Sunbird", Wilbur Smith 1972;
I read it too long ago to remember clearly, other than the typical Wilbur Smith racism, but all the reviews I've found say Phoenician, rather than Carthaginian, though I remembered it exactly as Carl Schwamberger said- refugees from the Roman conquest of Carthage who knew about southern Africa because of their Phoenician roots.

They end up getting wiped out by the encroaching Bantus.
 
And the meat is as good as beef, much mre red than most other fowl. I fully expect the US food industry to offer pre-fabricated ostrurduckens by 2025.

Here in Taiwan we had an ostrich ranch just south of where I lived, but it didn't succeed- very good hamburgers though.
 
"The Sunbird", Wilbur Smith 1972;
I read it too long ago to remember clearly, other than the typical Wilbur Smith racism, but all the reviews I've found say Phoenician, rather than Carthaginian, though I remembered it exactly as Carl Schwamberger said- refugees from the Roman conquest of Carthage who knew about southern Africa because of their Phoenician roots.

They end up getting wiped out by the encroaching Bantus.

Oh... not so good a read then. But the concept works very well!
 
"The Sunbird", Wilbur Smith 1972;
I read it too long ago to remember clearly, other than the typical Wilbur Smith racism, but all the reviews I've found say Phoenician, rather than Carthaginian, though I remembered it exactly as Carl Schwamberger said- refugees from the Roman conquest of Carthage who knew about southern Africa because of their Phoenician roots.

They end up getting wiped out by the encroaching Bantus.

think I read that one too... or the Readers Digest condensed version of it anyway. IIRC, the connection between the ancient past and the present in the novel were Bantu raiders (one back then, one present) that had some kind of odd birth defect in one of their feet that gave them a bird-like footprint...
 
think I read that one too... or the Readers Digest condensed version of it anyway. IIRC, the connection between the ancient past and the present in the novel were Bantu raiders (one back then, one present) that had some kind of odd birth defect in one of their feet that gave them a bird-like footprint...

It was in the Reader's Digest condensed books, 1973 #4 according to Wikipedia. I think I read it, there, too.
 
while it would be feasible to have someone outside bring a bronze age tech to SA, I was thinking more along the lines of what it would take for the natives there to develop it on their own, as one of the early river based civilization centers. And what seems to be lacking most of all is some kind of native grain, or something comparable. Unfortunately, about the only way to get around that is to go the ASB-ish route and invent one (which is a biological POD and not allowed here). Pity, because if they had that, they have just about everything else needed to get a start on civilization...
 
while it would be feasible to have someone outside bring a bronze age tech to SA, I was thinking more along the lines of what it would take for the natives there to develop it on their own, as one of the early river based civilization centers. And what seems to be lacking most of all is some kind of native grain, or something comparable. Unfortunately, about the only way to get around that is to go the ASB-ish route and invent one (which is a biological POD and not allowed here). Pity, because if they had that, they have just about everything else needed to get a start on civilization...

Actually, one might easily claim that, during the Neolithic or Paleolithic era, some tribes, carrying grain seeds in their clothes and tents, may have accidentally introduced a crop ancestor to the region.

Furthermore, in the Land of a Ice and Mice, it is an innovation of Dene-Ina agriculture making its way to a foreign people by way if exactly such tribal political changes, and not a founder crop, that leads to civilization arising there.

I don't think it would take too much to have some seeds carry "on the wind", and take hold in the most hospitable part that the southerners can access.
 
Why not amaranth? It provided a large portion of the pre-Columbian diet, after all, and is still a useful crop in large parts of Southern Africa. (It is the Year of the Pulse, let's not forget) There is a species native to South Africa and a few edible species and varietals scattered across the region.

There are also wild sorghum species that IOTL were never domesticated but did hybridize with the arriving Bantu crops.
 
Okay the agricultural situation is clearly not hopeless- some things are just a matter of random chance, after all.

Still, what would the culture actually look like? Say I picked a random people, like the Xhosa- what would their culture start to look like when they begin to settle? What is it going to transform into? What's their organized religion going to look like? What will they make their clothes out of and what would that look like? What are the mental "visuals" here?

The names of cities, people, gods? Would they have patriarchal despotships or are they like west Africans in that gender equality is pretty much level?

What might their architecture look like?

Goodness, so many questions. Do we have an expert on the indigenous peoples' cultures in South Africa?
 
Okay the agricultural situation is clearly not hopeless- some things are just a matter of random chance, after all.

Still, what would the culture actually look like? Say I picked a random people, like the Xhosa- what would their culture start to look like when they begin to settle? What is it going to transform into? What's their organized religion going to look like? What will they make their clothes out of and what would that look like? What are the mental "visuals" here?

The names of cities, people, gods? Would they have patriarchal despotships or are they like west Africans in that gender equality is pretty much level?

What might their architecture look like?

Goodness, so many questions. Do we have an expert on the indigenous peoples' cultures in South Africa?

The Xhosa are not indigenous- they are relatively recent arrivals. If they brought their Bantu crop package with them.... then their society would look like the Bantu societies just a hair north.
 
The Xhosa are not indigenous- they are relatively recent arrivals. If they brought their Bantu crop package with them.... then their society would look like the Bantu societies just a hair north.

Curses. Listen, they don't list language groups properly on Wikipedia:(

Granted . . . We have established that the Bantu carry some important pieces of the puzzle, like the crop package and iron working- Unless we go with the Phoenician theory, did the Phoenicians have iron working?

Also, can we apply all of those questions to an indigenous Khoisan first then?

Are the San Khoisan?

The reason why I made this thread in the first place is because I wanted to learn about the region's cultures and how they'd change to settled form.
 
San are the hunter-gatherers
Khoikhoi are the nomadic pastoralists (herding cattle, sheep, goats)

Khoisan is a portmanteau word to describe their common ethnicity.
(Related languages, genetics, etc. )
 
Why not amaranth? It provided a large portion of the pre-Columbian diet, after all, and is still a useful crop in large parts of Southern Africa. (It is the Year of the Pulse, let's not forget) There is a species native to South Africa and a few edible species and varietals scattered across the region.

There are also wild sorghum species that IOTL were never domesticated but did hybridize with the arriving Bantu crops.

Okay, let's cheat a little and say that one or two of these are similar to wheat/barley in the Fertile Crescent... big seeded, easy to domesticate... basically, worth the effort to leave hunting/gathering and take up farming. If we can get this happening roughly the same time as agriculture started in the Middle East, SA can make it in the civilization game. However, I'd think they are going to be slowed down compared to other places... they have a crop plant, but still don't have any domestic animals until later on (when outsiders bring them). Plus, from what someone was saying on here earlier, it seems that the ingredients for a copper/bronze age are kinda scattered around, so the metal/tool age may take somewhat longer. Still, it's a doable scenario...
 
San are the hunter-gatherers
Khoikhoi are the nomadic pastoralists (herding cattle, sheep, goats)

Khoisan is a portmanteau word to describe their common ethnicity.
(Related languages, genetics, etc. )

Thank you for the clarification.

Okay, let's cheat a little and say that one or two of these are similar to wheat/barley in the Fertile Crescent... big seeded, easy to domesticate... basically, worth the effort to leave hunting/gathering and take up farming. If we can get this happening roughly the same time as agriculture started in the Middle East, SA can make it in the civilization game. However, I'd think they are going to be slowed down compared to other places... they have a crop plant, but still don't have any domestic animals until later on (when outsiders bring them). Plus, from what someone was saying on here earlier, it seems that the ingredients for a copper/bronze age are kinda scattered around, so the metal/tool age may take somewhat longer. Still, it's a doable scenario...

I also out I forth the idea that a few Neolithic gatherers may accidentally carry seeds with them to the south due to some kind of unknown "political" intersection going awry.
 
Thank you for the clarification.



I also out I forth the idea that a few Neolithic gatherers may accidentally carry seeds with them to the south due to some kind of unknown "political" intersection going awry.

that might work, although I have to wonder just how much Neolithic traffic there was between the ME and SA...
 
San are the hunter-gatherers
Khoikhoi are the nomadic pastoralists (herding cattle, sheep, goats)

Khoisan is a portmanteau word to describe their common ethnicity.
(Related languages, genetics, etc. )

What Dathi said. In general, these peoples are the "remnant" populations left in southern Africa that weren't displaced or assimilated by the incoming Bantu. For example, they are the only cultures that maintain non-Bantu languages in the southern third of Africa. You can think of them as like the Basques - remnants of a much more widespread population. Many of the pre-Bantu populations were assimilated linguistically (such as the Pygmies of equatorial Africa, who speak Bantu languages but are genetically/physically distinct populations), and it's likely that others went extinct. At the same time, the Khoisan languages influenced the local Bantu varieties that came into contact with them - which is why some South African Bantu languages, in particular Xhosa and Zulu, employ click consonants.

"Khoisan" is one of the language families that Joseph Greenberg proposed in his mass classification of African languages in the 1950s. However, as with his other proposals, Khoisan has come under more intense scrutiny lately. It may represent several distinct language families that have grown similar due to prolonged contact; or it could indeed be a single language family of great antiquity. Greenberg felt, for example, that the Khoisan family is the most genetically remote language family in the world - that is, that all of the world's languages share a single common ancestor that excludes Khoisan. So we'd be talking on the order of 60,000 years old or more, if that's true.
 
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