Bantu Expansion: The Evidence from Physical Anthropology Confronted with Linguistic and Archaeological Evidence

Processes of expansion in central and eastern Africa, independently evidenced by linguistics, anthropobiology and archaeology, display such similar patterns that they may be regarded as facets of the same sequence of events. This paper develops mainly the anthropobiological evidence by using new methods of analysis based on multivariate distances. It ends with a coherent synthesis of the contributions of the three disciplines to the problems of Bantu expansion.