Page:George McCall Theal, Ethnography and condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505 (2nd ed, 1919).djvu/37

Rh The chief difference is that the skin of the Semang is of a dark copper colour, or chocolate brown to shiny black. The skin of the Bushmen is yellowish brown, darker or lighter according to the locality frequented by them. In every case the shade of the skin seems to denote that it was acquired for a purpose of the greatest utility.

The Semang, living in forest gloom, required a very dark skin in order to conceal themselves. Their remote ancestors may have been of quite a different tint. The Bushmen on the arid plains and bare mountain sides of South Africa were of the colour that was most advantageous to them, for they were almost invisible at a short distance, so closely did the tint of their skin resemble that of the dried-up soil. Even their scantily covered scalps were of advantage to them in this respect. After rains when high grass sprang up, through which they could creep covered with a few tufts, or in a bushy country where they could adopt disguises, their colour would be a matter of little importance, but on the plains of South Africa it meant much, for it enabled them, by keeping to leeward and making use of anthills or boulders or shrubs, to stalk their prey until within reach of their arrows.

Is it not reasonable to suppose that the same guiding mind which coloured so many of the lower animals in accordance with their environment should have exerted its beneficent power in aid of savage man in the same way? In the far distant time when the ancestors of the Bushmen made their first appearance in South Africa, they may not have been of the same colour as they were when Europeans first saw them. In the early years of the nineteenth century the traveller Burchell observed that the Bushmen north of the Orange were differently coloured from those south of that river, though each section had the tint best suited to its surroundings. Many others have noticed this peculiarity since Burchell wrote, though no such accurate records were made as could be desired. This cannot be accidental. Of course when clothing came to be worn by primitive man such changes were useless, and consequently ceased to take place.