'What is consumed is wasted': from foraging to herding in the southern African Later Stone Age

This paper is a reaction to a long and at times stagnated debate about how non-indigenous sheep, cattle and goats spread amongst southern Africa's Later Stone Age communities. Geneticists and linguists increasingly see connections between eastern and southern African pastoralists. East African archaeology can no longer be seen as just an interesting, yet neglected and distant, comparative dataset, but is instead a real piece of southern African history. In this spirit pastoralist faunal assemblages from eastern and southern Africa are compared. An approach that considers the similarities between groups practising different subsistence strategies and the differences between groups practising the same subsistence strategies softens the often-assumed stark distinction between hunter-gatherer and ‘true’ pastoralist. The apparent lack of evidence for migrating pastoralists in southern Africa may be explained by the misleading stereotypes of forager and pastoralists employed in the analysis. A model for the ado...