The San peoples of southern Africa, hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari and beyond, whose languages, often loosely grouped as 'Khoisan,' carry the click consonants, whose rock art is among the oldest and richest on earth, and whose genetic lineages branch near the root of the human family tree — a living people long flattened into a fantasy of the timeless primitive, and long dispossessed by farmers, colonists, and conservation states alike.
Their languages are punctuated by clicks, sounds made by drawing breath against the teeth and palate, and the older books called the speakers "Bushmen." Scientists who read human DNA found something startling. The deepest branches of the whole human family tree sit here, among the San of southern Africa. That has tempted writers to treat them as a window into the Stone Age, a people frozen in time. It is a tempting story and a false one. The San have farmed and herded and traded, been hunted and enslaved and evicted, and they are arguing for their land in courtrooms right now. They are not a relic. They are a present.