The San people (or Saan), also known as Bushmen or Basarwa are members of various indigenous hunter-gatherer people of Southern Africa, whose territories span Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa.
From the 1950s through the 1990s, the San switched to farming because of government-mandated modernisation programs.
Despite the lifestyle changes, they have provided a wealth of information in anthropology and genetics. One broad study of African genetic diversity completed in 2009 found that the San were among the five populations with the highest measured levels of genetic diversity among the 121 distinct African populations sampled. The San are one of 14 known extant "ancestral population clusters" from which all known modern humans descend.