page_title: History of the Kalenjin people
section_title: Neolithic
hierarchical_section_title: History of the Kalenjin people / Neolithic
caption_attribution_description: English: Pendant of the Elmenteitan culture,place of discovery Njoro River caves, exhibited at the Nairobi National Museum
context_page_description: The Kalenjin people are an ethnolinguistic group mistaken to be a tribe in Kenya, though they are actually a collection of tribes indigenous to East Africa, with a presence, as dated by archaeology and linguistics, that goes back many centuries. Their history is therefore deeply interwoven with those of their neighboring communities and, most notably, with the Iraqw, who are known to them as Sirikwa, as well as with the histories of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, South Sudan, and Ethiopia.
context_section_description: The arrival of the Southern Nilotes on the East African archaeological scene is correlated with the appearance of the prehistoric lithic industry and pottery tradition referred to as the Elmenteitan culture. The bearers of the Elmenteitan culture developed a distinct pattern of land use, hunting, and pastoralism on the western plains of Kenya during the East African Pastoral Neolithic. Its earliest recorded appearance dates to the ninth century BC (i.e. 900 to 801 BC).
  It is thought that around the fifth and sixth centuries BC, the speakers of the Southern Nilotic languages split into two major divisions: the proto-Kalenjin and the proto-Datooga. The former took shape among those residing to the north of the Mau range, while the latter took shape among sections that moved into the Mara and Loita plains south of the western highlands.
  While few large-scale excavations have been done on sites outside the Central Rift, regional surveys indicate that the population was far denser in the southern highlands during this time.
  The Datooga were specialized pastoralists on considerable scale, spreading their settlements westward after 400BC across the Mara plains and as far as southeastern Lake Nyanza. Their presence on the Mara and Loita plains would continue through to the seventeenth century AD when they were driven south by the Maasai during the Il-Tatua wars.
  Archaeological and linguistic evidence point to significant differences in ways of life between the Elmenteitan culture and the Savanna Pastoral Neolithic cultures that had preceded them in Kenya.
caption: The beads and pendants forming this c. 3,000-year-old neck chain are of the Elmenteitan culture and were among the finds at Njoro River cave.
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