Man And His Ancestor: A Study In EvolutionMorris, Charles
Science
Man And His Ancestor: A Study In Evolution
Morris, Charles
Human beings -- Origin
The discovery of these forest Pygmies has directed attention to the
Bushmen of South Africa, a desert-dwelling race, long known though
comparatively little regarded in their ethnological significance. They
are now by many regarded as an outlying branch of the forest Pygmies,
the chief difference being in the shape of the skull, which is rather
long in the Bushmen, rather short in the Pygmies. These degraded
wanderers inhabit an area extending from the inner ranges of the
mountains of Cape Colony, through the central Kalahari desert, to near
Lake Ngami, and thence northwestward to the Ovambo River. Into these,
the most barren portions of the South African deserts, they have been
driven by the encroachments of Kaffirs, Hottentots, and Europeans.
They closely resemble the Akka tribes of the north, averaging about four
and a half feet in height, and possessing deep-set, crafty eyes, small
and depressed nose, and a generally repulsive countenance. Their
complexion is of a dirty yellow. Their hair grows in small, woolly
tufts. In the vicinity of Lake Ngami, Livingstone found them to be of
larger stature and darker color, while Baines measured some in this
region who were five feet six inches in height. In disposition the
Bushmen are strikingly wild, malicious, and intractable, while their
cerebral development is classed by Humboldt as belonging to almost the
lowest class of the human species.
Close in affinity with the Bushmen, and in various respects unlike the
dark races around them, are the Hottentots, the original inhabitants of
Cape Colony, a race of herdsmen who are much superior in culture to the
degraded desert nomads. They are not dwarfish, being of medium stature,
but they resemble the Bushmen in complexion, in which and in general
cast of features they present some similarity to the Chinese. Their
hair, like that of the Bushmen, grows in tufts, with spaces between, and
they are like them in language, their method of speech consisting
largely in a series of clicking sounds. Their manner of talking has been
compared to the clucking of a hen, and by the Dutch to the "gobbling of
a turkeycock." The Hottentots present every appearance of being a
developed branch of the Pygmy family, or the result of a cross between
Bushmen and negroes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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