Bantu Expansion Reaches Southern Africa

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Bantu-speaking ironworking communities continued their centuries-long expansion into southeastern Africa, displacing and absorbing Khoisan hunter-gatherers across present-day KwaZulu-Natal and the Highveld. Cattle culture, iron smelting, and settled agriculture transformed the landscape. The migrations that had begun two thousand years earlier in West Africa were reaching their southern terminus, completing one of the greatest demographic movements in human history.