If we pass from the southwestern United States to South Africa, a
corresponding situation confronts us. The same area at one time formed
the habitat of the Bushmen and the Hottentots; yet, their mode of life
varies fundamentally. The Bushmen are essentially hunters and
seed-collectors, while the Hottentots are an eminently pastoral people.
Caves and crude windbreaks form the Bushman’s original dwellings, while
the Hottentots have mat-covered portable beehive-shaped huts. The
Bushman’s principal weapons are bow and arrow, with the Hottentot these
implements are of secondary importance as compared with the spear. It is
true that not only material objects but even myths and folktales are
shared by both tribes, but in many instances of this sort we have
clearly a case not of independent response to the same external
conditions but rather the result of borrowing. Thus, some of the traits
common to Hottentot and Bushman, for example, a fair number of mythic
episodes, occur likewise among the Bantu Negroes inhabiting contiguous
but geographically different territory. One of the most interesting
traits of ancient Bushman culture is the life-like representation of
animals on rocks and the walls of caves. Oddly enough, these engravings
and mural paintings, which distinguish the Bushmen from their South
African neighbors, have their nearest parallels in the Spanish
cave-paintings of Palæolithic Europe. The picturing of the mammoth and
reindeer by these old South European artists clearly proves that they
belonged to a glacial epoch, during which geographical conditions could
hardly have resembled those of the Kalahari desert.[2]
One other illustration from the same general region of the Dark
Continent is suggestive. The Ovambo and Herero, neighbors though they
are, differ in the essential features of their economic life. While the
Ovambo depend only to a very limited extent on their herds, deriving
their sustenance mainly from the cultivation of millet and other plants,
the Herero are the only non-agricultural Bantu people, being
predominantly pastoral.
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