Bantu Migration

“Two Heads are Better than One”

Allia Hoisington

History 101

Professor Emmons

Everyone is familiar with the term, “Two heads are better than one”. Of course, applying this expression, as most people know, can be helpful with efficiency and time management. This phrase becomes a simple form of terminology that is tossed around carelessly in everyday life. However, consider the assistance it aids to that of a historian or archeologist. Reflect on the challenges these individuals face when trying to discover truths about the past. It must be a difficult task when they have to maneuver with such limited resources at their disposal. Nevertheless, when the expression above is applied to these complex processes of determining events of the past, it gives a considerable amount of aid in piecing together a logical design of how things may have happened. For example, today, historians continue to search for the answers to migratory patterns of early peoples of different regions. By using a variety of different methods and procedures, they can collect plenty of information and use it form a general idea of the events that occurred so long ago. Some of the methods and procedures used nowadays include archeology, linguistics, and genetics. None the less, there can still be difficulties in each of the processes used to find information. A variety of obscurity and glitches arise when trying to find rational outcomes. In this paper, the migratory patterns of sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas will be mentioned and the difficulties that arise when searching for the answers will be brought to light. As usual, when trying to dig for the answers throughout history, predicaments arise. These quandaries are understandable though. For starters, trying to collect information from thousands of years ago proves to be difficult, though not impossible. However, a broad expanse for mistake and inaccuracy in data is quite obvious.
For example, researchers have attempted to recreate an accurate history of Bantu-speaking peoples in Africa. This has proved to be complicated because few written sources for central and southern Africa still exist. As they lack these sources, they have turned to another method of exposure, linguistics, which is the study of the nature, structure, and modification of human speech. In the 2nd millienium B.C.E., historians concluded that the Bantu-speaker’s migrated down from modern the Cameroon and Nigeria borderlands to the forested land, and then onto the Savanna, on the lower Congo River. They associate the Bantu people’s agriculture in this area to involve fishing and root cultivating from the language which included words for, fishing, fishhooks, dugout canoes, paddles, yams, and goats (McKay, 233-234).