Bantu speech communities expanded over large parts of sub-Saharan Africa within the last 4000-5000 years, reaching different parts of southern Africa 1200-2000 years ago. The Bantu languages subdivide in several major branches, with languages belonging to the Eastern and Western Bantu branches spreading over large parts of Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa. There is still debate whether thi...

Sunmmary Groups of South African Bantu boys and girls of 14 years, compared with local Caucasian children, have lower cortical thickness, cortical score, and crosssection and volume scores for second metacarpal. Yet, when these parameters on groups of aged Bantu men and women, 70-79 years, are compared with published values on corresponding Caucasians, there are no significant differences. Furt...

The aim of the study was to analyse the effects of 6 week (15 sessions) flywheel resistance training with eccentric-overload (FRTEO) on different functional and anatomical variables in professional handball players. Twenty-nine athletes were recruited and randomly divided into two groups. The experimental group (EXP, n = 15) carried out 15 sessions of FRTEO in the leg-press exercise, with 4 set...

The Lemba are a traditionally endogamous group speaking a variety of Bantu languages who live in a number of locations in southern Africa. They claim descent from Jews who came to Africa from "Sena." "Sena" is variously identified by them as Sanaa in Yemen, Judea, Egypt, or Ethiopia. A previous study using Y-chromosome markers suggested both a Bantu and a Semitic contribution to the Lemba gene ...

Settling an Old Debate In their article “Bantu expansion shows that habitat alters the route and pace of human dispersals,” Grollemund et al. (1) have accomplished more than just their stated intention: to identify the role of habitat in channeling the directions of the early Bantu farming settlement of the African equatorial rainforest. What is most important is that the authors essentially br...

The expansion of Bantu languages, which started around 5,000 years before present in west/central Africa and spread all throughout sub-Saharan Africa, may represent one of the major and most rapid demographic movements in the history of the human species. Although the genetic footprints of this expansion have been unmasked through the analyses of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA linea...

Southern Angola is a poorly studied region, inhabited by populations that have been associated with different migratory movements into southern Africa. Besides the long-standing presence of indigenous Kx’a-speaking foragers and the more recent arrival of Bantu-speaking pastoralists, ethnographic and linguistic studies have suggested that other pre-Bantu communities were also present in the Nami...

Technological and cultural innovations as well as climate changes are thought to have influenced the diffusion of major language phyla in sub-Saharan Africa. The most widespread and the richest in diversity is the Niger-Congo phylum, thought to have originated in West Africa ∼ 10,000 years ago (ya). The expansion of Bantu languages (a family within the Niger-Congo phylum) ∼ 5,000 ya represents ...

Tone in Bantu languages is rarely studied experimentally. This paper reports a production study which reveals the intricate interaction of tonal context and morphological structure in surface tone realization in Sepedi, a South African Bantu language.

Unlike most other modern Bantu languages, Kinande has faithfully preserved the Proto-Bantu contrast between [-ATR] and [+ATR] high vowels (Hyman, 2002). As a result, while other Bantu languages typically have only two contrastive high vowels (i.e. high back and high front), Kinande has four: [-ATR] [i u] and [+ATR] i u ]. 1 These four high vowels, together with mid [e o] and low [a], are laid o...