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3,000 Years Ago in South Africa

There tends to be a broad division in cave and rock in southern Africa. Towards the south, the paintings show human figures more realistically in scenes of battle or hunting. Farther north, humans are shown in more stylized form (sometimes reduced to geometric shapes), while funeral scenes form the subject matter. The Great Cave of Inoro in Kenya shows one of these funeral scenes, a kind of Noah's Ark, with fantastic creatures. There are giant birds with crocodile jaws for beaks, elephants with crenelated backs, and two-headed beasts. In many paintings, there is a background with lakes filled with fish, and various kinds of trees. It is possible to identify specific species of trees from the paintings.

Early Bantu cattle herding people had reached southern Kenya by this period. As the use of iron spread, the Bantu migrations increased. The Scythians and other iron using people of Asia owed their successful expansion to the superior quality of their iron weapons. In Africa it was not so much the iron implements used by the Bantu that led to their increased migration, but the production of iron itself. Melting iron needs ovens capable of generating great heat, and these iron smelting ovens use up large amounts of wood, the most common fuel of the time. So, huge tracts of forest were cleared to feed the iron smelters, but at the same time, these forest clearances led to the creation of more grazing land for the Bantu herds, setting up a chain reaction of nomadic expansion mixed with forest clearance.

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