Earliest Pre-History
With other countries in eastern Africa (Kenya and Ethiopia), Tanzania may have seen the emergence of the earliest ancestors of mankind, but no connection can be traced between those ancient hominids or, for that matter, the earliest known Homo sapiens in the area and any element in the modern population. Some of the ancestors of the present inhabitants may have been in the area more than 10,000 years ago; others came as late as the nineteenth century. But the antecedents of the great bulk of the population arrived over a period of many centuries beginning some time in the first half of the first millennium AD and continuing into the eighteenth century.
The process was gradual: small groups of people moved in stages from a point of departure, arrived in the area, and adapted to local conditions. If a desirable niche was occupied leapfrogging might take place, or the earlier inhabitants would be absorbed or driven out. Often a group's first area of settlement was not its last. The community as a whole or some segment of it might find itself uncomfortable for ecological or sociopolitical reasons with its then current situation and move on.
The earliest inhabitants of mainland Tanzania to which some of its peoples may be tentatively linked were hunters and gatherers some of whose shelters, stone tools and weapons, skeletal materials, and rock drawings have survived. These people were certainly in the area 3,000 to 5,000 years ago, and it is likely that they were present much earlier. It has been suggested, on the basis of a variety of evidence, that they were a part of a once relatively widespread peoples, sometimes called Khoisan speaking, most of them localized for many centuries in southern and southwestern Africa where Europeans came to call them Bushmen and Hottentots. The Sandawe and Hadzapi in northcentral Tanzania are thought to be remnants of these early inhabitants.
By the beginning of the first millennium BC parts of the Rift Valley of Kenya and northern Tanzania were occupied by a cattle-herding people using stone tools (and bowls) and resembling the Cushitic-speaking peoples of the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia and Somalia). On the basis of linguistic and other considerations scholars consider southern Ethiopia the point of origin of peoples speaking Cushitic languages, and it is argued that some of them began to move south through the Rift Valley before the first millennium BC.
There is no evidence that they migrated south of central Tanzania, and it is likely that they lived interspersed with the hunters and gatherers who had preceded them in the area. One site, that at Engaruka between lakes Natron and Manyara in northcentral Tanzania, suggests that some of the Southern Cushitic speakers turned to iron and agriculture roughly in mid-first millennium AD, but most remained pastoralists. What seem to be remnants of these early Southern Cushitic peoples are still found in northcentral Tanzania: the Iraqw, one of the larger ethnic groups, are among them.
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