in the ancient times, there had been mainly three classes.
1-hunter-gatherers wich are very very primative class, infact all humans have once been a hunter-gatherers in their early stages.
2-pastoral societies: here you have a people with more developed culture, intead of constantly hunting eggs, or animals for meat they are domosticating. they also a have private owneship..... there are those who have and those who have not.
3- agricultural societies: this was the most advanced ancient class. besides growing their crops, they can also be agro-pastoral so instead of moving and searching fresh pasture they would improve the pastures themselves in around them for their livestock. the best thing in them is that they are an organized communties with a local market economy and administratio. these are the different socio-cultural backgrounds of the somali pastoralists, the nubian and the abyssinian farmers.
following the introduction of islam and moving toward the north the coastal places, it was introduced the trade and other lifestyles and much of somali class and race have changed.
The Somalis belong to a subbranch of the Cushites, the Omo-Tana group, whose languages are almost mutually intelligible. The original home of the Omo-Tana group appears to have been on the Omo and Tana rivers, in an area extending from Lake Turkana in present-day northern Kenya to the Indian Ocean coast.
The Somalis form a subgroup of the Omo-Tana called Sam. Having split from the main stream of Cushite peoples about the first half of the first millennium B.C., the proto-Sam appear to have spread to the grazing plains of northern Kenya, where protoSam communities seem to have followed the Tana River and to have reached the Indian Ocean coast well before the first century A.D. On the coast, the proto-Sam splintered further; one group (the Boni) remained on the Lamu Archipelago, and the other moved northward to populate southern Somalia. There the group's members eventually developed a mixed economy based on farming and animal husbandry, a mode of life still common in southern Somalia. Members of the proto-Sam who came to occupy the Somali Peninsula were known as the so-called Samaale, or Somaal, a clear reference to the mythical father figure of the main Somali clan-families, whose name gave rise to the term Somali.
The Samaale again moved farther north in search of water and pasturelands. They swept into the vast Ogaden (Ogaadeen) plains, reaching the southern shore of the Red Sea by the first century A.D. German scholar Bernd Heine, who wrote in the 1970s on early Somali history, observed that the Samaale had occupied the entire Horn of Africa by approximately 100 A.D.
