---
title: "Bantu Speakers Crossed the Congo Rainforest Together, Studies Suggest"
description: "Language trees and DNA from thousands of Africans suggest the migrants split into eastern and southern branches only 2,500 to 3,500 years ago."
author: "rews desk"
published: 2026-11-07T12:15:55Z
modified: 2026-11-08T01:11:42Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/bantu-speakers-crossed-the-congo-rainforest-together-studies-2a1149
language: en
tags: ["history", "archaeology", "dna", "migration", "world"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Bantu Speakers Crossed the Congo Rainforest Together, Studies Suggest

*Language trees and DNA from thousands of Africans suggest the migrants split into eastern and southern branches only 2,500 to 3,500 years ago.*

By rews desk · November 7, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/bantu-speakers-crossed-the-congo-rainforest-together-studies-2a1149

## In brief

- Research suggests Bantu speakers crossed the Congo rainforest as one group, splitting east and south 2,500 to 3,500 years ago
- About 350 million Africans speak one of roughly 500 Bantu languages today
- A 2015 computational study of about 400 Bantu languages found the deepest diversity in the Congo rainforest
- A 2024 Nature study of 1,763 Africans found genetic diversity falls with distance from western Africa
- The Bantu homeland in Cameroon and the origins of Bantu iron smelting remain uncertain

Linguists and geneticists increasingly think the Bantu-speaking peoples who spread farming and ironworking across southern Africa crossed the Congo rainforest as one group, according to an article by Katarina Zimmer for Knowable Magazine that [Ars Technica republished on Saturday](https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/11/the-migration-that-transformed-africas-languages-genes-and-cultures/).

Only after reaching the forest’s southern fringes, roughly 2,500 to 3,500 years ago, did the migrants divide into one branch moving east and another moving south, the [Knowable article](https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/society/2026/how-the-bantu-migration-remade-africa) said. Some scholars had argued that the route forked before the forest. The descendants of that migration are many. About 350 million Africans speak one of roughly 500 Bantu languages, Zulu in the south and Swahili in the east among them, and at least as many people, including many African Americans and Afro-Latinos, carry Bantu ancestry.

The expansion started in western Africa 6,000 to 4,000 years ago and moved slowly. Where hunter-gatherers had mostly lived, the newcomers brought villages, crops, livestock, pottery and metalworking.

“It completely reshaped the demography in sub-Saharan Africa, and we are really interested in trying to understand it,” said Dr. Sandra Beleza, a population geneticist at the University of Leicester in Britain.

![Adults and children carry baskets and a pot along a winding path through dense tropical forest, illustrated in green, cream, and rust tones.](https://rews.cc/img/91582f8e091973225fe122c6470dbf81ee2acb3a.webp)

Much of the evidence for a single forest crossing comes from language. In 2015, researchers built a family tree by computer from about 400 Bantu languages. The languages of the Congo rainforest showed far more diversity and deeper splits than the others, a sign that speakers stayed there a long time, said Dr. Koen Bostoen, a linguist at Ghent University in Belgium and a co-author. Languages farther east and south seemed to descend from a narrower slice of that group.

Genetics points the same way. A team that analyzed the genomes of 1,763 Africans found the most diversity among Bantu speakers in western Africa, with diversity falling the farther populations lived from there. The study, led by Cesar Fortes-Lima of Uppsala University in Sweden, was [published in Nature in January 2024](https://ideas.repec.org/a/nat/nature/v625y2024i7995d10.1038_s41586-023-06770-6.html). Its sample included 1,526 Bantu speakers from 147 populations in 14 countries, [according to the university](https://www.mynewsdesk.com/uu/pressreleases/new-research-sheds-light-on-bantu-speaking-populations-expansion-in-africa-3289821), which said the data pointed to present-day Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo as possible crossroads.

“This is a typical signature of a population expanding from one place to another,” said Dr. Carina Schlebusch, an Uppsala geneticist and co-author.

In 2023, Dr. Beleza and colleagues compared the genomes of Bantu speakers in Angola, south of the rainforest, with those in Mozambique and in Cameroon. That work was among the later genetic studies that reached conclusions similar to the linguists’.

![A woodcut-style illustration shows a tropical tree with sprawling underground roots intertwining into a DNA double helix, surrounded by dark soil and scattered reddish seeds.](https://rews.cc/img/7160286ade4d55200ded08378dfb7e1aaf3b7e4e.webp)

The homeland is less settled. Language and DNA point to western Africa, in particular the Grassfields region of Cameroon, but the archaeological record there is thin. At Shum Laka, a rock shelter and the region’s best-studied site, pottery appears 7,000 to 6,000 years ago and becomes abundant 5,000 to 4,000 years ago. It may be a trace of Bantu ancestors. It may not.

Farther south, Dr. Alexandre Livingstone Smith, an archaeologist at Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa, traveled the Congo River by boat several times between 2010 and 2023 with a team led by the linguist Birgit Ricquier. In a number of villages he found shards in a style that matches pottery farther west, dated to 2,300 to 2,000 years ago. “That would be the potential first Bantu settlers of the forest,” he said.

Researchers still don’t know when or how Bantu speakers picked up farming and metalworking, or whether they invented iron smelting or learned it from neighbors. Whatever its origins, the craft got very good. Near Great Zimbabwe, capital of a kingdom that flourished from 1000 to 1700 A.D., furnace ruins survive as rubble, and at Mashava, a village 25 miles northwest, fragments still carry the fingermarks of the people who smoothed their clay linings. Some furnaces were close to an adult’s arm span across and drew air in on their own, without bellows, to reach the more than 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit needed to smelt iron.

![A woodcut-style illustration shows a tall clay furnace glowing orange at its base, with a broken curved section nearby in a dry, grassy landscape.](https://rews.cc/img/37eccaf2e023ef9ab383faebcc4973f40dc09942.webp)

“The number and size of these furnaces, together with the use of natural-draft technology, indicate intensive and technologically sophisticated iron production,” said Dr. Ezekiel Mtetwa, an archaeometallurgist at the Field Museum in Chicago.

The migration idea goes back a long way. When Vasco da Gama rounded southern Africa in 1497, a Portuguese crewman who had lived in west-central Africa could reportedly talk with people on the southeastern coast. Nineteenth-century linguists named the family Bantu, the plural of muntu, “human being” in many of the languages. Archaeologists later found pottery, villages, livestock and western African crops from the last 2,000 years, generally older in the north. “You can clearly see a north-to-south progression,” said Dr. Shadreck Chirikure, an archaeological scientist at the University of Oxford.

By the 1990s, some scholars argued the languages and skills could have passed between communities that never moved. DNA largely answered them. A 2009 analysis of 2,432 Africans found that Bantu speakers in western, central and southern Africa were far more closely related than the distances between them would suggest.

Dr. Schlebusch is now trying to recover DNA from ancient remains to pin down when and where different Bantu communities moved, Knowable reported.