AFRICAN BUSHMEN

Taranaki Daily News, 2 September 1929, Page 9

AFRICAN BUSHMEN

OLDEST SURVIVING RACE. PROBABLY VISITED SPAIN. The visit to South Africa of Monsieur l’Abbe H. Breuil, the eminent French palaeontologist, may enable him to add much to our knowledge of the Bushmen, wrote the Cape Times recently. L’Abbe Breuil is an authority on the rock paintings of Eastern Spain. He is one of those of the visiting scientists to whom the University of Cape Town has offered an honorary degree. After visiting the Victoria Falls, the distinguished visitor will make excursions to Salisbury where there are many Bushman paintings in the neighbourhood, and to Bulawayo, where he will no doubt be interested in the Khami ruins, in the neighbourhood of which large numbers of stone implements have been found. He will also pass through the Orange Free State, and will visit Stone Age stations and Bushman paintings all over South Africa.

He is not interested in the Zimbabwe ruins. “They are too recent to interest me,” he informed a representative of the Cape Times, smilingly. The Bushmen, he stated, were an extremely old race. With the Eskimos, the native of Terra del Fuego, the Negritos of the East Indian Archipelago, the Anuamans, and the Pigmies, they could be classed as belonging to the middle races of man in point of time. The oldest races had altogether disappeared, but relics of the middle races still remained —living fossils of humanity, as it were. Now they were to be found only in the extremities of the earth, where they had been driven by the later superior races. The Bushmen, he believed, dated beyond the time of the differentiation between the yellow races and the black. In some respects they constituted a theoretical prototype of the two races. In their high check bones and slant eyes they 'resembled the yellow races. Where they had originally come from was a problem, but he suggested Southern Asia. The most important find of rock paintings in Africa had been made in the Libyan Desert. These paintings depicted giraffes, ostriches and men, and were identical in type with the rock paintings found in the Karoo. They had been covered by predynastic Egyptian figures, showing that they were antecedent to these in time. In the opinion of the Abbe, the rock paintings in Spain indicated that the Bushmen had crossed over to Spain from Africa, rather than that they had entered Africa through Spain.

Speaking of the theory that Africa was the “cradle of the human race,” he explained that the discovery of the Broken Hill skull provided evidence to the contrary. This skull was found in a formation belonging to a later period than the race it represented. This would indicate that Africa had more likely provided a last re-, fuge for some of the expiring oldest races.