Regional-global change linkages: Southern Africa

Abstract

Unravelling the skein of global change effects in southern Africa is a non-trivial task. It is made all the more interesting since Africa is the birthplace of humanity. Southern Africa preserves an impressive five-million-year record of human-environmental interaction. From the evolutionary cradle onwards, environmental change has profoundly affected the development of the early and later hominids into Homo sapiens (Vrba et al.1995). More recently, over the past two millennia, environment was a major factor affecting migrations of Bantu people into southernmost Africa. Until as late as the nineteenth century, environment continued to be a dominant factor affecting the settlement and survival of the population of the region.