Page:George McCall Theal, Ethnography and condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505 (2nd ed, 1919).djvu/33

Rh of the Bushmen in Southern Europe, who lived there in what is termed the Aurignacian period, nearly in the middle of the palæolithic or rough stone age. They were negroids of small size, with short twisted hair. Their faces were almost vertical down to the bottom of the nose, and they had prognathous or projecting jaws and retreating chins, exactly similar to the Bushmen of South Africa. This is ascertained from two of their skeletons found in the Grimaldi caves at Mentone.

Their weapons and tools were the same in form and size, so much so that if a handful of Bushman arrowheads and scrapers were thrown into a heap of similar implements say in the museum at Brussels, they could not be separated again except by some one with a thorough knowledge of the composition of the rocks from which they were taken.

Engravings on pieces of ivory of the mammoth, now long extinct, made by these people, similar in character to Bushman engravings on stone, are familiar to students in the great museums of Europe. Many paintings on the walls and roofs of caverns, their work also, have been found during recent years in France and Spain. They are of exactly the same style as those of the Bushmen of South Africa, but of course represent different animals.

The best of these paintings yet discovered in Europe is a herd of bisons on the roof of the cavern of Altamira in Spain, in which various colours were used. Equal as a work of art, if not superior to it, is a hunting scene from a cavern in the mountains bordering Griqualand East in South Africa. Two stone slabs became detached from the roof of this cavern, and fell upon a heap of dust and debris,