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Ancestry populations · Classical Antiquity

East and Southern Bantu

The Bantu-speaking farmers, ironworkers and cattle herders of eastern and southern Africa, from the Lake Victoria highlands to Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe. One of the 50 curated source populations in the Classical Antiquity era of Ancient Ancestry, Ancestrify's qpAdm analysis.

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Who they were

Artistic interpretation of the East and Southern Bantu (AI-generated artwork, not documentary evidence)
Period
500 BC to 1500 AD
Era in the analysis
Classical Antiquity
Region
Eastern and southern Africa
Role in the model
Source (left) population, a reference qpAdm tests against

From about 500 BC, Bantu-speaking farmers carrying iron tools spread through the savannas of eastern Africa and, over the following centuries, into southern Africa. They grew sorghum and finger millet, herded cattle, smelted iron and built villages that grew into towns. In the south, Mapungubwe flourished on the Limpopo from the eleventh to the thirteenth century on cattle, ivory and the gold trade with the Swahili coast, and around AD 1300 Great Zimbabwe replaced it as the interior's main trading centre, raising great walls of dry-laid stone. In the north, farmers such as the ancestors of the Luhya worked the highlands of western Kenya near Lake Victoria. The reference genomes here come from present-day Luhya and other Bantu-speaking people of Kenya and from Herero, Ovambo, Tswana and other Bantu-speaking people of southern Africa, who stand in for the peoples of these regions before European contact.

As the farmers advanced they met and mixed with the foragers and herders already living there. Bantu-speaking peoples received significant gene flow from the local groups in the regions they expanded into (Fortes-Lima et al. 2024), and ancient genomes trace the farmers replacing or absorbing the older hunter-gatherer populations of the east and south (Skoglund et al. 2017; Wang et al. 2020; Lipson et al. 2022). This ancestry is carried across eastern and southern Africa today.

In Ancient Ancestry, Ancestrify's qpAdm analysis, East and Southern Bantu is a source in the "Classical Antiquity" era. The report shows its weight with a standard error and a Z-score, so you can see not only how much of the model it carries but how confidently that share is separated from zero, and a model that cannot support it is rejected rather than published. For genomes from eastern and southern Africa it is the Bantu source to read first, beside the West-Central African Bantu source; the two are related, so the model may divide one Bantu signal between them and their weights are best read together.

Y haplogroup E1b1a and the mtDNA L lineages are characteristic of populations rich in this ancestry. A haplogroup alone is never evidence of a share.

In your report

From about 500 BC, Bantu-speaking farmers carrying iron tools spread from the Great Lakes region through the savannas of eastern Africa and, over the following centuries, into southern Africa. They grew sorghum and finger millet, herded cattle, smelted iron and built villages that grew into towns. In the south, rulers at Mapungubwe and later Great Zimbabwe grew rich on cattle and the gold trade with the Swahili coast and raised great walls of dry-laid stone, while in the north farmers such as the ancestors of the Luhya worked the highlands of western Kenya near Lake Victoria. The reference genomes here come from present-day Luhya and other Bantu-speaking people of Kenya and from Herero, Ovambo, Tswana and other Bantu-speaking people of southern Africa, who stand in for the peoples of this region before European contact. This ancestry is carried across eastern and southern Africa today.

Artwork is an AI-generated artistic interpretation informed by the archaeological record, not documentary evidence.

Where this population sits in the model

Ancient Ancestry, our qpAdm analysis, models your genome once per era. The Classical Antiquity era has 50 curated source populations, and East and Southern Bantu is one of them: every candidate model for that era is a combination of these sources, tested against a fixed set of outgroup populations, and only a model that passes the statistical fit check is published, with a p-value and a standard error on every proportion.

A reference, not a verdict: every population on this page is a source the model tests your genome against, a well-sampled point in ancient genetic space that a mixture of ancestries can be expressed in terms of. A weight on it means your genome is well described as partly resembling those people; it is never a statement that they, specifically, were your ancestors, and a population that fits well is not the only one that could.

Read how qpAdm works on the Ancient Ancestry page, or the definitions in the glossary.

Model it yourself for free

The Ancestrify Lab runs in your browser, with no account. Paste a Global25 row into an admixture calculator that covers the Classical Antiquity era, rank the closest ancient populations in the distance tool, or run f4, qpWave and qpAdm on the public panel in the AdmixTools 2 workbench. These are Global25 fits and exploratory statistics, not the formal qpAdm model of Ancient Ancestry.

Questions

  • Who were the East and Southern Bantu (500 BC to 1500 AD)?

    East and Southern Bantu is one of the 50 curated source populations in the Classical Antiquity era of Ancient Ancestry, Ancestrify's qpAdm analysis: a group of published genomes pooled as a single reference the model can test your genome against. These are ancient individuals from one archaeological context wherever the record holds them, and present-day genomes standing in where it does not, which the description on this page says.

  • Does East and Southern Bantu in my result mean they were my ancestors?

    No. A source population is a reference the model tests against, never a statement about who your ancestors were. A coefficient on this source means the ancestry those burials represent helps explain your genome to within statistical noise: similar ancestry composition, not descent from those individuals. Ancestrify never claims a population is your ancestor.

  • What does a East and Southern Bantu percentage in a qpAdm model mean?

    qpAdm estimates the mixture proportions that best explain your genome as a combination of the chosen sources, given a fixed set of outgroup (right) populations, and reports a p-value for whether the model is statistically acceptable together with a standard error for every proportion. The percentage is that estimated share, with its uncertainty published beside it.

  • How do I get a qpAdm model that uses East and Southern Bantu?

    Order Ancient Ancestry, Ancestrify's qpAdm analysis (€29.99, one-time), and upload the raw file you already have from a consumer test. Your genome is merged into the AADR reference panel and modelled across both eras; each era's model is built from that era's source populations, so a model for the Classical Antiquity era draws on East and Southern Bantu where it improves the fit.

  • Can I model East and Southern Bantu ancestry for free first?

    Yes. The Ancestrify Lab runs Global25 admixture calculators, a nearest-populations distance tool and an AdmixTools 2 workbench in your browser with no account, and several calculators cover the Classical Antiquity era. Those are G25 fits, not formal qpAdm models. Ancient Ancestry, the paid analysis, is the one with a p-value.

More populations from the Classical Antiquity era

Browse the full directory of source populations, or continue with another population from the same era:

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