The hunter-gatherers of southern Africa known as 'Bushmen' or 'San' are not one single ethnic group, but several. They speak a diverse variety of languages, and have many different settlement patterns, kinship systems and economic practices. The fact that we think of them as a unity is not as strange as it may seem, for they share a common origin: they are an original hunter-gatherer population of southern Africa with a history of many thousands of years on the subcontinent. Drawing on his four decades of field research in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, Alan Barnard provides a detailed account of Bushmen or San, covering ethnography, archaeology, folklore, religious studies and rock-art studies as well as several other fields. Its wide coverage includes social development and politics, both historically and in the present day, helping us to reconstruct both human prehistory and a better understanding of ourselves.

'This book provides a masterful synthesis of what is over a century of ethnographic research, but it is in advocating for anthropology to not lose sight of the value of comparison … that it makes a broad and valuable contribution to the discipline.' Megan Laws, Anthropos

Alan Barnard is Emeritus Professor of the Anthropology of Southern Africa in the University of Edinburgh. He has over 40 years' experience of field research with Bushmen or San in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. His publications include Language in Prehistory (Cambridge, 2016), Genesis of Symbolic Thought (Cambridge, 2012) and Social Anthropology and Human Origins (Cambridge, 2011).