The history of the Bantu-speaking peoples from South Africa has in the past been misunderstood due to the deliberate spreading of false narratives such as "The Empty Land Myth". First published by W.A. Holden in the 1860s, this doctrine claims that South Africa had mostly been an unsettled region and that Bantu-speaking peoples had begun to migrate southwards from present day Zimbabwe at the same time as the Europeans had begun to migrate northwards from the Cape settlement, despite there being no historical or archaeological evidence to support this theory.