Département de Préhistoire, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, UMR 7194 du CNRS, Paris, France.
PLoS One. 2012;7(7):e40340. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0040340. Epub 2012 Jul 11.
The origins of herding practices in southern Africa remain controversial. The first appearance of domesticated caprines in the subcontinent is thought to be c. 2000 years BP; however, the origin of this cultural development is still widely debated. Recent genetic analyses support the long-standing hypothesis of herder migration from the north, while other researchers have argued for a cultural diffusion hypothesis where the spread of herding practices took place without necessarily implicating simultaneous and large population movements. Here we document the Later Stone Age (LSA) site of Leopard Cave (Erongo, Namibia), which contains confirmed caprine remains, from which we infer that domesticates were present in the southern African region as early as the end of the first millennium BC. These remains predate the first evidence of domesticates previously recorded for the subcontinent. This discovery sheds new light on the emergence of herding practices in southern Africa, and also on the possible southward routes used by caprines along the western Atlantic coast.
南非放牧实践的起源仍然存在争议。人们认为，家畜山羊在该次大陆的首次出现时间约为公元前 2000 年；然而，这种文化发展的起源仍然存在广泛争议。最近的遗传分析支持牧民从北方迁移的长期假说，而其他研究人员则认为存在一种文化扩散假说，即放牧实践的传播发生了，而不一定暗示同时发生大规模的人口迁移。在这里，我们记录了莱德洞穴（纳米比亚厄兰戈省）的晚期石器时代（LSA）遗址，其中包含已确认的山羊遗骸，我们推断早在公元前一千年末，家畜就已经出现在南非地区。这些遗骸早于以前记录在案的该次大陆家畜的最早证据。这一发现为南非放牧实践的出现提供了新的线索，也为沿大西洋西海岸的山羊可能使用的向南路线提供了线索。
