Page:George McCall Theal, Ethnography and condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505 (2nd ed, 1919).djvu/36

12 ears are small, and very few of the men have any beard. The hair is spirally curled, the mouth is large, and the jaws are prognathous. They do not practise circumcision, nor do they tattoo their bodies.

They are nomads, use rock shelters or screens of leaves for habitations, coil themselves up to sleep on a heap of leaves without a pillow, make baskets and mats, eat anything and everything edible, sometimes consume raw flesh, produce fire by the friction of two pieces of wood, and cook their food in the most primitive manner. Their implements of stone are not ground or polished. They do not make canoes or rafts, but harpoon fish, and use baskets as nets.

Their marriage rites are of the slightest kind, they bury their dead entire, there is no trace of an actual cult among them, they make traps, pitfalls, and snares to catch game, their only domestic animal is the dog, they have no words for any numeral higher than three or four, and yet they are decorative artists. On ornaments for the heads of their women and on their quivers they trace geometrical patterns, outlines of animals, and figures believed to be charms.

Every assertion in these paragraphs applies to the Bushmen, and though there are some characteristics mentioned in addition to these, which are not applicable to those people, they are such as might have easily arisen from their different environments. These are that the Semang have round bright eyes, straight and far apart; their foreheads are low and rounded, and their cheeks are full; their heads are covered with frizzled hair more closely than those of Bushmen. They do not use skins or feathers for clothing, but make bark cloth, and wear girdles of fungus peel; their women wear magic combs, with patterns engraved on them. They do not make pottery; their musical instruments are all formed of bamboo; they use bedsteads made by lashing half a dozen thick bamboo poles together, and raising this platform on supports. They have no great fear of ghosts; and they have a dim belief in mythological personages, of whom Kari is their highest god, and is obeyed by Tuhan and Pie.