ABSTRACT
Although radiocarbon dating has shown that people were using rock shelters in Lesotho 50,000 years ago, the first inhabitants of whom we know much were the San, or Bushmen. They were primarily a hunting and gathering culture, using stone tools, and lived in Lesotho for many hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Their rock paintings are found throughout modern Lesotho. By the sixteenth century, if not much earlier, they had been joined by iron-working cultivators and herders. These were members of the two main branches, Sotho and Nguni, of the Bantu-speaking peoples who had begun their migration into Southern Africa over a thousand years earlier. By the late eighteenth century Sotho groups predominated throughout most of this area, except for its southeastern fringes, where Nguni-speakers were prominent. The San, users of a simpler technology, came under increasing pressure from both groups. Although they bequeathed to these groups vestiges of their culture, particularly through intermarriage, they were forced into local extinction by the late nineteenth century.
