Origins Linguistic evidence points to the eastern
Middle Nile Basin south of the
Abbai River, as the nursery of the
Nilotic languages. That is to say south-east of present-day
Khartoum. It is thought that beginning in the
second millennium B.C., particular Nilotic speaking communities began to move southward into present-day South Sudan where most settled and that the societies today referred to as the
Southern Nilotes pushed further on, reaching what is present-day north-eastern Uganda by 1000 B.C. lived next to an Eastern Cushitic speaking community with whom they had significant cultural interaction. The general location of this point of cultural exchange being somewhere near the common border between Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia. He suggests that the cultural exchange perceived in borrowed loan words, adoption of the practice of circumcision and the
cyclical system of age-set organisation dates to this period. Linguist Christopher Ehret suggests 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. ==Recent History==