‘Where goats connect people’: Cultural diffusion of livestock not food production amongst southern African hunter-gatherers during the Later Stone Age

Where hunter-gatherers become ‘hunters-gatherers-with-sheep’ not ‘food-producers’

This paper is primarily concerned with the uptake of domestic animals by hunter-gatherers in southern Africa after their first introduction into the subcontinent, most probably by migrating pastoralists of eastern African origin from approximately 2200 years ago (Breton et al., 2014; Güldemann, 2008; Macholdt et al., 2015; Pleurdeau et al., 2012; Smith, 2014).

At various times and places in southern Africa, hunter-gatherers kept livestock. The faunal evidence suggests that their reasons for doing so had little to do with subsistence. Complementary to the archaeological evidence is the ethnographic work of the members of the Kyoto University African Studies team in the Central Kalahari (Ikeya, 1993; Osaki, 1984, 1990; Sugawara, 1991; Tanaka, 1969, 1976). From the 1960s onwards, they observed goat-keeping amongst hunter-gatherers in the Central Kalahari. This is supplemented by the work of other Kalahari ethnographers and by ethnographic evidence from eastern Africa. Although studies of Kalahari goat-keeping-hunter-gatherers are frequently cited in the debate around how and why domestic livestock without agriculture spread in southern Africa (i.e. the hunter-to-herder debate, for a review see Orton (2015)), the detail of these studies, particularly their findings on why hunter-gatherers kept stock, are ignored.

When hunter-gatherers are found with domestic livestock in the southern African Later Stone Age archaeological context, they are described not as pastoralists but as ‘hunter-herders’ (Sadr, 1998), ‘hunters-with-sheep’ (Sadr, 2003; Smith, 2008) and ‘hunters-with-livestock’ (Sadr, 2013). Implicit in these labels is that they describe a people who remain hunters and gatherers: they are not food-producers. While this has been noted by Africanist archaeologists (e.g. Jerardino et al., 2014; Sadr, 2003), little consideration has been given to why hunter-gatherers would keep livestock if not for eating? Why continue to hunt when you have another meat source on your doorstep? Sadr (2004) has provided the only attempt to explain this distinction, although his model of prestigious meat feasts ultimately places the value on sheep as things to eat in the southern African Later Stone Age. What implications does this have for studies that attempt to compare the ‘Neolithic’ transition in southern Africa to Europe (such as Gronenborn, 2004; Jerardino et al., 2014; Russell, 2004)?

Cereal-eaters, bean-eaters and milk-eaters of southern Africa

‘Hunters-with-sheep’ describes the contribution of wild meat to the diet, but we know that amongst hunter-gatherers, with or without sheep (as with other subsistence groups), the bulk of the diet is made up of other foodstuffs (Guenther, 1986: 129; Silberbauer, 1965: 43; Tanaka, 1969: 5, 1976: 112; Yellen and Lee, 1976: 38).

If we define people by what they eat, then it is more accurate to describe modern-day Bantu-language speakers in southern African as cereal-eaters (maize (Zea mays) being the staple crop; in the past the staple grasses were pearl millet (Pennisetum americanum), finger millet (Eleusine coracana) and sorghum (Sorghum bicolor)) (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1990: 197; Kuper, 1961: 137; Mitchell, 2002: 272; Shaw, 1974: 92). Hunter-gatherers as observed and recorded at contemporary times and places are better defined as bean-eaters (e.g. Bauhinia macrantha) (Tanaka, 1976: 106), nut-eaters (e.g. Ricinodendron rautanenii) (Yellen and Lee, 1976: 38) or melon-eaters (e.g. Citrullus lanatus) (Tanaka, 1976: 108; Wilmsen, 1997: 155). The archaeology suggests they were also geophyte-eaters (e.g. Watsonia sp.) (Deacon, 1993). Some southern African pastoralists, for example the Khoe-speaking Nama (Parsons and Lombard, 2015) and Bantu-speaking Himba (Jacobsohn, 1995: 45), may have been predominately milk-eaters in the past. Modern ethnography shows us that across the region people avoided slaughtering livestock, which are conserved for use in ritual and in exchange to maintain social ties between people (e.g. see Kent (1993) on the Kgalagadi, Comaroff and Comaroff (1990) for the Tswana, Kuper (1961) for the Swazi, Shaw (1974: 94) on Nguni speakers). The complexity of the human–livestock relationship is captured in Shipton’s (2007) lucid description of the interactions of Luo people and their animals in East Africa.

Subsistence change: The dominant and limiting explanation for the transition to stock-keeping in southern Africanist interpretations

Both of the major players in the hunter-to-herder debate in southern Africa interpret the transition to livestock-keeping in terms of food production (Sadr, 2003, 2013; Smith, 2014). Thus, Sadr (2013: 171) writes that

Key questions in the history of Southern African herding thus have been: How, when and why did livestock come to be herded in the subcontinent? The questions matter because the early exploitation of domesticated livestock (or plants, for that matter) heralds a transition from hunting and gathering – where food is extracted from what nature freely provides – to a strategy where food is grown or nurtured, quasi produced. Producing food is, in effect, the accumulation of private property. To make this economic transition, egalitarian hunting and gathering societies with a strict ethos of sharing would need to adopt new social rules to accommodate the concept and practice of private ownership. Egalitarianism itself would be threatened since the surplus from food production ultimately facilitates the appropriation of others’ labour.

In evaluating the ethnographic and archaeological data, I find that an explanation that gives primacy to the social value of livestock finds more support than those that favour livestock as things to eat. As Kent (1992: 51–52) remarks of the Kutse hunter-gatherer stock-keepers, ‘The husbandry of goats, in other words, does not seem to have impinged greatly on subsistence activities nor transformed the society into a pastoralist one’. Similarly Sugawara (1991: 103) observes of the ≠Kade stock-keepers, ‘San remain ‘hunter-gatherers’ at least in their attitude toward livestock’. Perhaps the term ‘Neolithic’ (i.e. ‘Stone Age with food production’ (Sadr, 2003: 197)) is misplaced amongst southern African non-agriculturist hunter-gatherer-livestock-owners.

The ethnographic evidence from 20th-century hunter-gatherer-stock-owners

From the 1960s, there have been ongoing studies by Japanese ethnographers among a community of G//ana, G/wi and Kgalagadi stock-owners in the ≠Kade area of central Kalahari (Ikeya, 1993; Sugawara, 1991; Tanaka, 1969, 1976) (Figure 1). They provide an example of what happens to hunter-gatherers who own livestock. All camps in ≠Kade keep goats. Their herds range in number from eight to 440 (Ikeya, 1993), goats being most numerous (numbering 2700 in 1987). There are also some donkeys and horses (Ikeya, 1993). The G//ana and G/wi are Khoe-speaking hunter-gatherers, whilst the Kgalagadi are Bantu-language speakers and therefore traditionally thought of as food-producers (although see Kent’s (1993) observation that they too survive on hunted and gathered foodstuff in the Kutse area, just south of ≠Kade). OPEN IN VIEWER

I summarize those observations made by Ikeya (1993), Osaki (1984), Sugawara (1991) and Tanaka (1969, 1976) that are pertinent to this argument. First, livestock are not eaten. Hunter-gatherer-stock-keepers continue to depend on hunting and gathering for subsistence (Tanaka, 1976: 100). Ikeya (1993) observes during fieldwork between August 1987 and January 1988 that ‘it is still very rare for San to eat goat meat’. Rather the goats’ significance is their social function, because ‘goats connect people’ (Ikeya, 1993: 47). Second, livestock are in constant circulation. The networks of exchange of livestock between camps, which Ikeya describes as ‘goat–consignment relationships’, extend over an area of ±150 km (see also Sugawara, 1991). The parallel with East African pastoralist livestock entrustments is striking (Schneider, 1979; Shipton, 2007; Spencer, 1973) (Figures 2 and 3). Livestock entrustment–consignment relationships may be between blood relatives or acquaintances (Ikeya, 1993; Shipton, 2007). In the act of circulating livestock, social ties are formed and reinforced, and risk and wealth are shared. As has been described for East African stock entrustments, the livestock-keeper has the right to use their milk (although very little milking is recorded amongst these hunter-gatherers) and to keep certain offspring born during the consignment period (Ikeya, 1993; Schneider, 1957). The subtleties of stock entrustments perplex Sugawara (1991: 103–104):

…it is also difficult to specify a definite economic purpose for the practice of caretaking goats. Although further systematic research covering all the goat owners throughout the community is required, it is probable that caretaking goats might be one of the means by which the owner and the caretaker reaffirm alliance or friendship between themselves. OPEN IN VIEWER

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Figure 3.

Livestock entrustment relationships amongst East African livestock-keepers as recorded in one month (Schneider, 1979: 199, Figure 20, courtesy of Indiana University Press. All rights reserved).

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Figure 4.

An example of ear-marking as observed by the author amongst the Turkana, northern Kenya in 2009.

In an account of a Nharo goat-keeper in Ghanzi, Guenther (1986:141) observes that, ‘N!au will only rarely slaughter one of his goats’. Instead they are used for barter or to pay the fee of a Nharo healer or a Kgalagadi diviner in times of ill health. N!au regularly hunts by snaring and Nharo women gather plant foods (Guenther, 1986).

Working amongst other hunter-gatherer-stock-keeper groups in Botswana both Cashdan (1980) and Kent (1993) made similar observations: that hunting and gathering continued as the subsistence base of these stock-owners and that, as with many African stock-keeping peoples, domestic stock were rarely eaten and only when, for example, they died of natural causes or were used in ritual.

Sadr (2013: 178) ignores this key detail, stating that,

The dearth of LSA livestock remains might indicate instead of pastoralism a subsistence strategy similar to one recorded among mid- to late-twentieth-century Kalahari hunter-gatherers who kept small flocks of goats (Ikeya, 1993; Kent, 1993). The Kalahari goat-herders perhaps represent a transitional stage from hunting and gathering to true pastoralism, or maybe they represent a distinct subsistence strategy more common in the past. (Emphasis added)

The archaeological evidence for livestock-keeping in South Africa

The archaeological faunal assemblages of sites containing domestic stock in southern Africa show a herding people whose diet was predominately wild (see Russell and Lander (2015a) for quantitative data showing the percentage of domestic fauna at Later Stone Age sites in southern Africa, also Sadr (2013) for an alternative count). Bantu-language speakers, whose spread is linked to agro-pastoralism and iron-working and slightly post-dates the arrival of domestic stock into the drier western half of southern Africa, kept cattle for social wealth and rarely slaughtered them (Huffman, 2007; Shaw, 1974: 94). This is confirmed at early Iron Age farming sites where cattle bones are rare, making up just 0.01–22 per cent of the total faunal assemblage (see Huffman, 2007; Russell and Lander, 2015a). At the 35 southern African Later Stone Age sites that have the traces of domestic stock without agriculture, the percentage of domestic stock in the total mammalian faunal assemblage is also very low: the median is 8 per cent domestic stock (Russell and Lander, 2015a). Recently, Horsburgh et al. (2016) have claimed that domestic stock have in instances been misidentified in southern African assemblages; if true, the numbers of domestic stock are likely to be even lower than those presented (see Bousman et al. (2016) and Scott and Plug (2016) who challenge this claim). Livestock were rarely consumed during the Later Stone Age period.

Genetic studies amongst modern-day Nama speakers of Namibia show that they bear a genetic signature which tells of their long milch pastoralist history, as retained in their ability to digest milk into adulthood. It might be difficult to distinguish sites of milch pastoralists from those of hunter-gatherer-stock-keepers, as both would contain very low numbers of livestock remains (see Garcea (2003: 119), for this dilemma at North African archaeological sites and Russell and Lander (2015a) for a more general discussion). In certain contexts the distinction might be made on the presence or absence of hunted fauna at a site. Archaeological sites with 100 per cent domestic stock in the faunal assemblage found in East Africa are described as representing ‘pure’ pastoralism (Gifford et al., 1980). We would expect wild foodstuffs and domestic plants to be absent amongst those practising ‘pure’ pastoralism, who show disdain for the consumption of foods that do not have a pastoral origin (see this dietary ideal as described for the Maasai by Århem (1989), who appear to subsist entirely off pastoralist products (milk and blood) with minimal slaughtering of stock (and then of mainly small stock) and with no wild foodstuffs or agricultural products consumed (see also Jacobs, 1975: 407)). This is obviously an extreme form of pastoralism – others show varying degrees of reliance on hunted, gathered or grown foodstuffs (Hodgson, 2000; Marshall, 1990).

In the drier part of southern Africa, where domestic stock spread without agriculture, the archaeological assemblages show very little change with the introduction of stock (see Sadr (2013) for an overview). Sometimes domestic livestock bones occur with thin-walled, undecorated pottery (Lander and Russell, 2015; Sadr and Sampson, 2006; Schweitzer, 1979) and possibly a change in stone tool assemblage (Orton, 2017; Parsons, 2008; Sadr, 2015). The lack of any clear signature with this arrival is one of the reasons that the demic versus cultural diffusion debate has endured.

Resilient hunter-gatherers: Hunting for eating, livestock for connections, entrustments and exchange

The hunter-to-herder debate in southern Africa has been dominated by a model that starts with food production and leads to the accumulation of surplus, ownership of private property (linked to power, wealth and status) and the ultimate domination of food-producers over non-food-producers (Sadr, 1998, 2013; Smith, 1990, 2014). Rather than interrogating the suitability of the model to multiple southern African contexts over the last 2200 years, the response has been to focus on whether hunter-gatherers could cope with a surplus given their ethos of sharing and egalitarianism (Sadr, 1998, 2013; Smith, 1990, 2014).

The model might falter at its very foundations – that the transition to livestock-keeping amongst southern African hunter-gatherers had little to do with food production. The system within which livestock were owned by hunter-gatherers was one that closely resembles those amongst East African livestock-keepers. The system is a generous one, designed to share risk and productivity and to build social networks around reciprocity. It militates against the appearance of accumulated wealth and surplus by ensuring that livestock are continuously circulated (see Kuper (1961: 151) for this practice amongst Swazi agro-pastoralists and Shipton (2007) for the Luo, East Africa). Perhaps with the arrival of domestic stock, hunter-gatherers saw an opportunity to strengthen existing networks of exchange and reciprocity and to enter into new ones – with immigrant pastoralists and later with agro-pastoralist farmers.

In 2004, Sadr proposed that sheep and fine ceramics in Later Stone Age southern African hunter-gatherer contexts were part of a parallel prestige economy based on capital accumulation and feasts where sheep were consumed as an act of conspicuous consumption (after Hayden, 2001, 2003; Sadr, 2013). The model has been critiqued elsewhere (Russell and Lander, 2015a). However, two of Sadr’s (2004) points hold; first, that hunter-gatherers’ subsistence base remained unchanged with the keeping of livestock; and second, that sheep may have been passed between groups, in what Sadr (2004) describes as ‘gift exchange’ or ‘down-the-line-trade’. The spread was by cultural rather than demic diffusion.

The archaeological record of domestic stock bones shows that they are found across a wide area of southern Africa in a short period following their first arrival on the landscape towards the end of the first millennium BC (see Pleurdeau et al. (2012) for a summary of the evidence for livestock remains in the southern African archaeological record; also Orton et al. (2013) for a more recent early date for cattle in South Africa) (Figure 1 shows only those domestic bones that are directly dated). It is not hard to imagine that this could have happened through a process of cultural diffusion among established exchange networks, perhaps alongside a demic diffusion of pastoralists. Ikeya (1993) found that livestock were exchanged over a distance of ±150 km in the ≠Kade area. Given the extent of such exchange networks it is easy to see this form of cultural diffusion as the mechanism for dispersing livestock widely and rapidly.

Another question in the southern African hunter-to-herder debate has been from whom hunter-gatherers first acquired stock. Livestock–consignment relationships provide a mechanism for this. The offspring of livestock born whilst on consignment are often shared with their keeper. There are other mechanisms that could have been active too. It has been argued elsewhere that hunter-gatherers may have initially exchanged desirable products such as honey for small stock or that livestock might have come into hunter-gatherer hands through bridewealth payments for hunter-gatherer women (Huntingford, 1955; Kratz, 1986; Russell and Lander, 2015a, 2015b). Once marriages occur between livestock-keepers and hunter-gatherers, then their offspring (however they identify) will inherit their herds. Ikeya (1993) describes as G//ana, the son of a G//ana women and a Kgalagadi man. The son inherited his rich Kgalagadi father’s large herd upon his death and at the time of the study had the largest herd, 440 goats, in the ≠Kade area. Ikeya (1993) recorded that this G//ana man had 10 consignment relationships during the study period – the highest number of such relationships recorded in ≠Kade – suggesting that the larger the herd the greater the need to disperse it by sharing.

Genetic studies among modern-day southern African populations show that the lactase persistence allele, C-14010, is found at its highest frequencies in the modern-day Khoe-speaking pastoralist Nama of the Namibia (Breton et al., 2014; Macholdt et al., 2015). This suggests that they have a long history of fresh milk drinking. The same allele is found in East Africa where this allele probably originated, suggesting evidence for the migration of pastoralists from east to southern Africa (Breton et al., 2014; Macholdt et al., 2015). Interestingly the allele is found in its highest frequency amongst Khoe speakers today (i.e. irrespective of subsistence) (see Barnard (1992: 23–24) for the distribution of Khoe and non-Khoe speaking hunter-gatherers). In Ikeya’s (1993) study amongst Khoe-speaking G//ana and G/wi hunter-gatherer-stock-keepers, goats were infrequently milked. Whilst mimicking the practices of milch pastoralists, for example young were sometimes separated from their mothers during the day or dung was applied to the udder to deter feeding, they did not seem interested in collecting milk as an important part of the diet. Frequently the young kids were able to find their mothers during the day, for, unlike goats kept by modern-day Turkana, they were not kept corralled during the day (Ohta, 1982) (Figure 5). Only small amounts of milk collecting were recorded by Ikeya (1993), observing that 200 ml of milk was collected at the end of one afternoon (this is confirmed by Sugawara (1991: 103) in later studies). This might be a consequence of the low milk production of goats during the dry season or simply the lack of desire for milk on the part of these stock-keepers. There are no observations of milk being drunk immediately – instead it is added to tea and porridge (both are recent introductions to hunter-gatherer diet) (see also Guenther, 1986: 141). Unlike Bantu-language-speaking agro-pastoralists, there is no mention of the consumption of sour milk or milk products (which have lower levels of lactose and are thus easier to digest) (Sansom, 1974: 150), although these are consumed amongst the hunter-gatherer-stock-keepers of Nyae Nyae (Marshall and Ritchie, 1984). At the time of Ikeya’s (1993) study in the 1980s, a borehole had been drilled at ≠Kade, removing the scarcity of water that was encountered by hunter-gatherers living here earlier to this. When Tanaka (1969) worked in ≠Kade in the late 1960s, there was no borehole and the hunger-gatherers living there met all their liquid requirements with water found in wild plants and animals in the drier months, and rainfall in the wet season. Might milk, like water, have been a more valuable resource in the Later Stone Age in the drier parts of southern Africa? Perhaps in earlier times more milk was drunk and it was valued more highly by hunter-gatherers. The low and regular consumption of fresh milk might account for the presence and persistence of the lactase allele amongst Khoe-speaking hunter-gatherers. OPEN IN VIEWER

Overcoming kin pressure and maintaining herd viability – Unique to hunter-gatherers?

One of the key arguments against hunter-gatherers keeping livestock has been the suggestion that it is difficult for hunter-gatherers to maintain a viable herd because of the pressures to slaughter stock for immediate consumption and sharing amongst kin (Sadr, 1998: 122, 2013; Smith, 1990: 59; 2006). As Smith (1990: 59) argues amongst hunter-gatherers, ‘There are excellent functional reasons for sharing with small-scale communities living in marginal environments, but it makes the sustaining of a viable breeding herd difficult if the animals are immediately slaughtered to meet the demands of kin for meat’ (Lee, 1979: 413). Lee (1979: 413) tells the story of two !Kung men whose attempts to raise herds and to farm are put under pressure through the demands made by their kin to have a share of the produce – though in fact neither of these men actually fail in their pursuits. This could be the story of many an African farmer or herder – the social pressure to share is not unique to hunter-gatherers and nor is sharing either a strictly atavistic or hunter-gatherer quality (see Kuper’s (1961) mid-20th-century ethnographic account of this pressure among Swazi agro-pastoralists, for example). Pressures to share, so ringmarked a feature of Bushmen society, are not confined to hunter-gatherers. In contemporary Black ¹ South Africa these pressures are so insistent and widespread they have been caricatured as an extra tax, ‘Black tax’, ² from which whites are exempt. Guenther (1986: 164) observes the guilt felt by Tsaxa, a Nharo man, as he complains to him that ‘the moment a Bushman has something, others descend on him’. His aspirations to own livestock, just as those of modern-day Black South Africans to create a better life for themselves, are thwarted by the ongoing demands from visiting kin for a share of money and resources. Further research to understand the rules by which kin and ownership are defined amongst these different groups is necessary to develop this argument. For example, the !Kung and Nharo have an ideologically universal system of kinship (Barnard, 1989, 1992). This means that they classify as kin all those with which they associate, and there is no category of ‘non-kin’ (Barnard, 1989: 198, 1992: 266).

Smith’s (1990) argument that hunter-gatherers slaughter their stock under these demands overlooks the more plentiful ethnographic studies of 20th-century hunter-gatherer-stock-keepers, who rarely slaughter their livestock and who share their livestock (and their produce) alive rather than dead. Moreover, the ethnographies suggest that whilst the pressure may be there it does not thwart the aspirations of hunter-gatherers who want to keep stock. Ikeya (1993) describes the movement of one particular goat through five households as it is circulated between them to fulfil different purposes. There are in fact excellent functional reasons for sharing livestock amongst small communities in marginal environments – to spread the burden of grazing and watering, to militate against stock loss due to disease and to circulate prime breeding stock. There are also excellent intangible reasons to do so – to build and sustain bonds of reciprocity, to gain prestige and respect.

Livestock–consignment relationships amongst hunter-gatherers would allow for the circulation of prime breeding stock and would thus remove the need for stock-keepers to keep large herds for viability. Contra Smith (1990) (and also Gronenborn (2004: 8) for a similar point of view) even very small herds, such as those evidenced in the archaeological record and amongst hunter-gatherer-stock-keepers, would be viable in a system in which animals were circulated. As Sugawara (1991: 101) describes it,

…a large-scale goat owner is willing to entrust the management of a part of his herd to other camps. Similarly, anyone who owns only a few goats also tends to entrust them to his or her close kin living in another camp who relatively speaking already have many more goats. As a result, a complex network of keeping-and-entrusting relationships for goats has spread through the community.

Transitions to small stock easier than to cattle-keeping

The archaeological evidence suggests that small stock-keeping predominated from the time of the first introduction of livestock to southern Africa at around 2200 years ago. From approximately 2200 BP to 500 BP, small stock outnumbers cattle at all non-agriculturist sites that have domestic animals (see Russell and Lander, 2015a: 1). The domestic livestock assemblages at southern African Later Stone Age sites reflect a people who were primarily small livestock-keepers. Of the total 473 minimum number of individuals (MNIs) of domestic livestock remains for all Later Stone Age sites over a 1500-year period, 77 per cent of the bones are those of caprines. Only 21 MNIs have been identified as cattle ³ (Russell and Lander, 2015a). This has important consequences for the ease of transition from hunter-gatherer to hunter-gatherer-stock-keeper. The smaller the stock, the less the need for water and grazing. They require minimal keeping (Guenther, 1986: 141) and reproduce faster than cattle (Roderick et al., 1998; Wilson et al., 1984). The Turkana, eastern Nilotic pastoralists of East Africa, keep predominately small stock (Lokuruka, 2006). Ohta’s (1982) study of these pastoralists shows that their caprine herds move autonomously during the day and require little herding. Similar observations have been made in Botswana, by Ikeya (1993) and Sugawara (1991: 103) in ≠Kade and Guenther (1986) among the Nharo. ⁴

The higher reproduction rate of small stock might make them particularly desirable to groups who value their circulation and social value. It is for this explicit purpose that they were kept in higher numbers than cattle by the Kikuyu of East Africa, as noted in 1938:

The Gikuyu people are agriculturists; they herd large flocks of sheep and goats, and, to a lesser extent, cattle, since their social organization requires a constant supply of stock for varied purposes as “marriage insurance,” payments, sacrifices, meat feasts, magical rites, purification ceremonies, and as means of supplying clothing to the community. (Kenyatta, 1938: xv)

Was there a ‘Neolithic transition’ in southern Africa?

How does the distinction between livestock-keeper and livestock-eater affect the debate about Neolithic transitions in other parts of the world? The reasons and mechanism of spread must surely have affected spread rate. Russell (2004) and, more recently, Jerardino et al. (2014) showed that the rate of spread of livestock was faster in southern Africa than the spread rate of 1 km/year for the movement of Neolithic agro-pastoralist farmers in Europe (Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza, 1971, 1984). Interpreted as demic diffusion, this rate masks the great variation in spread rate when smaller areas within Europe are analysed (Gkiasta et al., 2003). Jerardino et al. (2014) interpret the southern African evidence as a Neolithic transition spread by cultural diffusion.

If livestock in southern Africa were spreading across wide-ranging and already existent exchange networks without being eaten and if, in addition, new networks were being created (with immigrant pastoralists?), then the rate of spread may have been fast (as borne out by the extent of goat circulation at ≠Kade). Such a spread rate might be different in a model of cultural diffusion of stock amongst livestock-eaters where exchange might slow down as livestock were eaten. Perhaps the fast spread of livestock across South Africa was not an artefact of the mode of spread (i.e. cultural diffusion) but rather about the social value of things circulated not consumed.

Concluding thoughts

We can never hope to understand the real and original function of such customs as the lobola transfer of cattle for a bride, or the sacrifices to the dead, until we realise that we are in contact with ideas of cattle radically different to our own. (As noted by Winifred Hoernlé whose research amongst the Nama started in 1912 (Carstens, 1985: 117))

Ethnocentric interpretations that chart a trajectory from food production to the exploitation of the labour of others miss the nuances, subtleties and variety of relationships that may exist between people and their livestock. As Shipton (2007: 81) describes,

the movement and sharing of living, breathing beings: transfers and counter-transfers of humans and animals over time. These are loans in a sense, but seldom just that; here one enters a zone where economic terms like loans or debts become hard to apply, or seem too simplistic, on their own, but where entrustment and obligation are no less vital.

Perhaps these hunter-gatherer societies had qualities that made the transition to stock-keeper a simple one – for example, as Sadr (2004) has suggested, perhaps stock were easily accommodated within already established exchange networks, or perhaps, as Russell and Lander (2015b) have suggested, they had delayed-returns system already in place that would have facilitated the transition to stock-keeper (see Dale et al. (2004) and Kusimba (2005) for discussion of delayed returns among other African hunter-gatherers). Stock would have been valued as exchange items that might have facilitated hunter-gatherer entry into wider exchange systems with newcomers, opening up the doors to hunter-gatherers obtaining marriage alliances and other items (beads, pottery, iron) from other livestock-keepers on the landscape, in addition to reinforcing already established exchange networks.

This paper was written under a heavy police presence on my own campus, with the sound of rubber bullets and stun grenades fired at protesting students (#feesmustfall). One of the demands of protesting students is the transformation of the curriculum in South African universities to include more African indigenous knowledge and African perspectives (see Jopela and Fredriksen (2015) and Lane (2011) for a discussion of the need to incorporate African knowledge systems into the production of African archaeological knowledge and Mbembe (2015) for a more general discussion of the issues that these protests have raised). This has led me to reflect on how a Black South African anthropologist might have interpreted the laments of Bushmen at the incessant demands from distant relatives for a slice of the pie – this would have possibly been a point of commonality rather than disjuncture. It is probable that the Black South African anthropologist would not have seen this as a hurdle particular to hunter-gatherers, but perhaps one that might affect poor Africans in all communities (with even poorer kin and with less resources to share out). It is probable that 2000 years ago there was more equality and less displacement. Perhaps the debilitating part of the system of sharing is an artefact of the colonial and post-colonial era. Jopela and Fredriksen (2015: 274) note that, ‘there is little evidence that indigenous conceptions have been incorporated into archaeological interpretations or that archaeological reasoning has been shaped by them’. This paper attempts to contribute in a small way to the goal to ‘Africanize’ the curriculum by trying to imagine how the archaeological record might be interpreted differently by using a worldview that forefronts African livestock relationships in archaeological explanations of the hunter-to-herder debate.