Khoisa

Khoisan or Khoesaan ( KOY-sahn) is an umbrella term for the various non-Bantu indigenous peoples of Southern Africa who traditionally speak click languages. Throughout Southern Africa, they are recognized as the historical communities that predate the Bantu expansion and European colonisation. At the time of European contact, Khoisan peoples had the largest populations in areas climatically unfavourable to Bantu sorghum-based agriculture, from the Cape region to Namibia and Botswana, with scattered populations elsewhere in the region, and were soon displaced from areas conducive to European wheat-based agriculture. They consist of two economic groups, the pastoralist Nama and Damara, and the hunter-gatherer San a.k.a. Bushmen. Mingling with Bantu-speaking groups is evidenced by prevalence of click consonants in Southern African Bantu languages such as Zulu, Xhosa and Yeyi.

It is possible that some Khoisan peoples descend from an early dispersal of anatomically modern humans to Southern Africa before 150,000 years ago, though there are also suggestions that those ancestors may have been a source population for anatomically modern humans. Their languages show limited typological similarity, largely confined to the prevalence of click consonants and the kinds of similarities one can expect from a sprachbund.