To a lesser extent they occur in three neighbouring groups of Bantu languages—which borrowed them, directly or indirectly, from Khoisan.
Long before colonial times (prior to 1652), the indigenous peoples (the Khoisan or Nama) of the area extracted raw or "native copper" from the gneiss and granite hills that make up the surrounding Namaqualand Copper belt.
Many, however, can also trace their ancestry to the Dutch/Khoisan mulatto clans of the Cape.
Diana Ferrus (born 29 August 1953, Worcester, Western Cape) is a South African writer, poet and storyteller of mixed Khoisan and slave ancestry.
One study has found haplogroup A in samples of various Khoisan-speaking tribes with frequency ranging from 10% to 70%.
It was the ancestral haplogroup of not only modern Pygmies like the Baka and Mbuti, but also Hadzabe from Tanzania, who often have been considered, in large part because of some typological features of their language, to be a remnant of Khoisan people in East Africa.
They were once considered to be a branch of a Khoisan language family, and were known as Central Khoisan in that scenario.
These peoples live in that region, which today is the Cuando Cubango Province, together with other small groups, belonging to the Ovambo, Ganguela or Khoisan.