The ancestors of today’s Bantu speakers, like the rest of humanity, were originally hunter-gatherers.

Gunnink et al. have stated that our study fails to provide evidence of a deep history of cultural and linguistic evolution among Central African hunter-gatherers (CAHGs). Whilst in our original study we discussed in detail the evolutionary processes possibly accounting for the distribution of musical instruments and related terms among CAHG, perhaps we were not explicit enough in the results section addressing lexicon. This appears to have led Gunnink et al. to misinterpret our aims, methodology, and results. Furthermore, they offer a highly unparsimonious alternative to our views that requires several unlikely and independent events simultaneously, and perhaps most importantly, they fail to acknowledge that all farming populations and their languages shared a hunter-gatherer ancestor with extant CAHGs only a few thousand years ago.