These people were hunter gatheres they whole lives up until a hundred or so years ago
The emergence of the Proto-Nilotes may have been connected with the domestication of livestock. The Eastern Sudanic unity must have been considerably earlier still, perhaps around the 5th millennium BC (while the proposed Nilo-Saharanunity would even date to the Upper Paleolithic about 15kya). The original locus of the early Nilotic speakers was presumanbly east of the Nile in what is now South Sudan. The Proto-Nilotes of the 3rd millennium BC were pastoralists, while their neighbors, the Proto-Central Sudanic peoples were mostly agriculturalists.[6]