Page:George McCall Theal, Ethnography and condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505 (2nd ed, 1919).djvu/34

10 which preserved the painting perfectly until the slabs were discovered and removed to the South African museum in Capetown, where they can now be seen. When pieced together, the painting is 2.39 metres in length by 92 centimetres in width, and represents seventeen elands, the largest thirty-two centimetres in length, beautifully drawn and shaded in colour, with grotesque figures of hunters using their weapons. Some of the elands are foaming at the mouth from exhaustion, and from the nostrils of one, which is in the attitude of falling, blood is actually dropping. One hunter is hamstringing an eland with a battle-axe, which together with iron-headed arrows, shows that the picture cannot be very old, as it must have been painted after the intrusion of the Bantu into that part of the country, not three centuries ago. An opinion held by most investigators that the older pictures are better as works of art than the more recent ones is thus proved to be incorrect. At all times there must have been a few individuals who excelled as painters and sculptors, while there were many who could only produce daubs.

No figures of human beings have yet been discovered among the paintings of the Europeans, but statuettes made by them have been found at Mentone and other places, which represent the Bushman type of body, with its steatopogy or very protuberant buttocks of adipose matter. There can hardly be a question therefore of the identity of race, the only difference—though a very important one if the measurements can be relied on—observable between them being that the skulls of the European branch were a little longer in proportion to their breadth (horizontal cephalic index 68 or 69), and the cranial capacity or size of the brain was much greater.

What became of the negroid inhabitants of Southern Europe no one can say. They were there before the close of the great ice age, and then they disappeared as other races had done before them. This was in Professor Sollas's mind when he conjectured that they migrated into Africa;