“One of the most intractable problems in reconstructing African linguistic prehistory is whether the pygmies ever had their own language. Letouzey (1976) made a preliminary attempt to recover a substrate language through the use of plant names but without any very convincing results. Bahuchet (1992, 1993) presents a challenging view of the history of the pygmy populations, in particular the Aka and the Baka. Despite speaking Niger-Congo languages of quite different genetic affiliation, these groups prove to have common vocabulary, concerning especially with food-gathering in the rain-forest. If Bahuchet is right, then this vocabulary constitutes a trace of the lost language of the pygmies. Bahuchet further argues that the reduction in the rain-forest at the end of the Pleistocene isolated pygmoid groups in relict forest. These groups diffused outwards when the forest began to expand again, eventually encountering the incoming Bantu cultivators. “

That’s all.

Kambiz

The meDNA research suggests a somewhat different explanation, however: the influence of Pygmy women taken as wives by “Bantu” men. Since these women might well tend to raise their children according to Pygmy traditions, it’s not difficult to see how certain aspects of Pygmy musical practice could seep in to Bantu culture over time. As the research you’ve referenced suggests, these are relationships that go back thousands of years, so there would have been plenty of time for the musical traditions to meld.

For more on Pygmy music, its history, and its relation to the music of neighboring non-pygmy groups, see my recently published essay, “New Perspectives on the Kalahari Debate,” in the latest issue of Before Farming: http://www.waspress.co.uk/journals/beforefarming/