Page:George McCall Theal, Ethnography and condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505 (2nd ed, 1919).djvu/25



the commencement of the twentieth century a great advance in our knowledge concerning the early savage inhabitants of South Africa as well as of Europe has been made through discoveries of their implements and other handiwork, coupled with remains of their skeletons found where they were buried. In Europe the successive advances and retreats of the great sheet of ice that once covered the whole of the northern and central parts of that continent, as Greenland is covered to-day, afford means for classifying in order of time the various races that once lived there, and the implements they used furnish proofs of the different stages of knowledge they had reached. South Africa, owing to its geographical position, has not been covered with ice since man first made his appearance here, or in other words since the pliocene or termination of the tertiary period as termed by geologists. There must have been great variations of climate, but these were insufficient to compel man to remove altogether from any locality to another far distant. We have here therefore a more unbroken chain of race, not as in Europe one race disappearing and another quite different taking its place, or possibly two very dissimilar races existing near each other at the same time.

It is not possible to state in years, or in centuries, or even in millenniums, the length of time that man has existed