Genes and archaeology are revealing how Bantu speakers spread across much of Africa. //

Scientists are extremely interested in the peoples who created this and other iron-powered societies across eastern and southern Africa. Research points to an adaptable and innovative group from western Africa as the masterminds. Known as Bantu speakers, these communities began gradually expanding across the continent’s southern half, starting from 6,000 to 4,000 years ago. In doing so, they introduced a fundamentally new, sedentary way of life—characterized by farming, raising livestock, pottery-making, and metalworking—to regions previously dominated by hunter-gatherer communities.

This migration transformed not only the region’s history and technology, but also its languages: Today, around 350 million Africans speak one of roughly 500 distinct Bantu tongues, from southern African Zulu to eastern African Swahili. And at least as many Africans—as well as many African Americans and Afro-Latinos—carry Bantu ancestry in their DNA. //

Linguists working in the 19th century started referring to the language family as Bantu, the plural of muntu, meaning “human being” in many Bantu tongues. Later linguists reasoned that the languages stemmed from an ancestral people who migrated across the continent from western Africa, which harbors the greatest diversity of Bantu languages (as would be expected for where the languages originated).