The Sotho-Tswana people are a meta-ethnicity of southern Africa and live predominantly in Botswana, South Africa and Lesotho. The group mainly consists of four clusters; Southern Sotho (Sotho), Northern Sotho (which consists of the Bapedi, the Balobedu and others), Lozi, and Tswana people. A fifth cluster is sometimes referred to as the Eastern Sotho, and consists of the Pulana, Makgolokwe/Bakholokoe the Pai and others. The Sotho-Tswana people would have diversified into their current arrangement during the course of the 2nd millennium, but they retain a number of linguistic and cultural characteristics that distinguish them from other Bantu-speakers of southern Africa. These are features such as totemism, a pre-emptive right of men to marry their maternal cousins, and an architectural style characterized by a round hut with a conical thatch roof supported by wooden pillars on the outside. Other major distinguishing features included their dress of skin cloaks and a preference for dense and close settlements, as well as a tradition of large-scale building in stone. The area now settled by the various Sotho-Tswana groups was reached by the Bantu expansion by about AD 500. The standard theory asserts that the Sotho-Tswana are descended from a group that moved southward from the Great Lakes in a separate movement from the other Southern Bantu groups, proceeding along the western part of present-day Zimbabwe. Ethnonym The Sotho-Tswana ethnic group derives its name from the people who belong to the various Sotho and Tswana clans that live in southern Africa. Historically, all members of the group were referred to as Sothos, the name is now exclusively applied to speakers of Southern Sotho who live mainly in Lesotho, and the Free State province in South Africa, while Northern Sotho, is reserved for Sotho speakers that inhabit northern South Africa, predominantly in Limpopo. Sotho Ethnonym The Basotho name was derived from the word "sootho", "brown" , which means the ones with dark/brown melanin. "Ba sootho" directly translates to "They are brown". The usage of the word has always been part of the vocabulary of the Sotho-Tswana nation. The word became ascribed to a specific people due to regional conflicts: different bantu clans splitting from their ancestor clans and taking the name of their leader as their identity, but naturally in essence every Batho/Bantu people is a mosotho. Tswana Ethnonym The ethnonym Batswana is thought to be anantonym that comes from the meaning of the Sotho-Tswana word