Palaeontological surveys in the Miocene of southern Africa over the past decade have shown that, like the endemic plants of the Cape Floristic Realm, there are numerous lineages of animals that originated in southern Africa during the Neogene. The spread of some of the plants and many hitherto endemic southern animal lineages northwards into the tropics and beyond into Eurasia from Middle Miocene times onwards, has concealed the appreciation of southern endemism, because several of the lineages that used to be endemic to southern Africa have subsequently become pan-African or even cosmopolitan. It has even been written that southern Africa was an evolutionary cul-de-sac that was the recipient of lineages from elsewhere but that did not itself participate in the origination of any new lineages. However, the recent work reveals that, during the Neogene, southern Africa was indeed a major centre of evolutionary novelty. Among lineages now considered to have originated there are the ostrich, the Nile crocodile, pliohyracids, bovids and other groups, most of which were previously thought to have originated in the tropics or even in Eurasia. It is likely that the early onset of arid biotopes in the Namib well before they occurred anywhere else in Africa, started a long period of adaptation to semi-arid, arid and hyper-arid conditions, well removed from similar biotopes in other parts of the world. The location of the Namib, in the southwestern extremity of the continent, meant that it was far from the Eurasian landmass, a factor that no doubt promoted a high degree of isolation of its gene pool from that of the latter region, and thus greatly weakened the effects of the Eurasian gene pool on southern African faunas compared with its influence on northern and eastern African ones. At the same time faunas in north and central Africa on the one hand and Eurasia on the other were participating in relatively free genetic flow on a much more regular basis throughout the Miocene. When other parts of Africa became arid in the Late Miocene and Plio-Pleistocene, several lineages that had originated in southern Africa spread northwards and occupied those areas, replacing some of the autochthonous lineages before they themselves could adapt to the changes.