‘The Bushman’, Alan Barnard says, is a concept that slowly emerged over the centuries, one that was not obvious to the first Europeans who encountered them (Barnard 2007, 11). The clear distinction of the hunter-gatherer Bushman, as set apart from the Khoekhoe herders, was not properly established until 1812 in Henry Lichtenstein's Travels in Southern Africa, in the Years 1803, 1804, 1805 and 1806:

The confusion was due to a myriad of different names given to people with differences or perceived differences in subsistence strategies and ways of life, whether they were hunters, herders, fishermen, thieves and rascals or a little bit of everything.

The debate about the origin and identity of the first pastoralists of southern Africa, and whether the indigenous people of the Cape were in fact of different ethnic identities, or rather the same people surviving as herders in good times and hunters during times of duress, is ongoing (Marks 1972; Schrire 1980, 1992; Elphick 1985; Sadr et al. 2003; Sadr 2008; Smith 2008, 2016), recently also including data from outside the domains of both anthropology and archaeology (Güldemann 2008; Soodyall et al. 2008; Morris et al. 2014). Within the context of the Kalahari, the debate, known as the ‘Kalahari debate’ or the ‘revisionist debate’, reached its peak in the early 1990s (Solway and Lee 1990; Wilmsen and Denbow 1990; Lee and Guenther 1991; Wilmsen 1993). Whereas the traditionalists tended to work with ‘distinct’ Bushman groups (the Ju/’hoan, the Nharo and so on) as a relevant and relatively stable unit of analysis, the revisionists emphasised the centuries of contact and mobility between foragers and farmers in the Kalahari. Instead of understanding the foraging way of life as a taken-for-granted, ethnically related subsistence strategy of a relatively unchanging society, the revisionists focused on the mobility and negotiation between economically unequal parts operating within the same resources (Barnard 2007, 97, 103, 110).