Early Bantu speakers crossed through the dense Central African Rainforest 4,000 years ago

The Bantu Expansion transformed sub-Saharan Africa’s linguistic, economic, and cultural composition. Today, more than 240 million people speak one of the more than 500 Bantu languages. It is generally accepted that the ancestors of current Bantu speakers lived around 5,000 to 6,000 years before present in a region by the current border of Nigeria and Cameroon. However, until recently, it was not known how and when they succeeded in crossing southward through or around the dense Central African Rainforest to finally settle in their current locations, covering about half of the African continent.

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