Travelers and merchants from the Persian Gulf and Western India begin to visit the East African coast in the first millennium CE.
The region of present Tanzania is probably one of the oldest known inhabited areas on Earth; fossil remains of humans and pre-human hominids have been found dating back over two million years.
More recently, Tanzania is believed to have been populated by hunter-gatherer communities, probably Cushitic and Khoisan speaking people.
Bantu-speaking people from western Africa began to arrive about two thousand years ago in a series of migrations.
These groups brought and developed ironworking skills and new ideas of social and political organization.
They absorbed many of the Cushitic peoples who had preceded them, as well as most of the remaining Khoisan-speaking inhabitants.
Nilotic pastoralists are later arrivals, and will continue to immigrate into the area through to the eighteenth century.
