Page:George McCall Theal, Ethnography and condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505 (2nd ed, 1919).djvu/91

Rh discovered a great number of Bushman paintings and engravings, asserted that the oldest he found there are superior as works of art to the more modern. All of them were executed before the arrival of Bantu in the country, for there is not a single instance of individuals of that race or of their weapons being represented, and the Bushmen were entirely exterminated by the Bantu invaders. These paintings and engravings must therefore be at least over a thousand years of age. The engravings are not easily discovered, as the rocks upon which they were made have completely resumed their original colour. Some of the paintings were executed over others that had become faded from long exposure, and there are even instances where this has taken place three or four times. Who can say when the earliest of them was executed?

Mr. Hall compares the pictures and engravings of the Aurignacian negroids in Europe with those of the Bushmen in Bhodesia, and shows them to be similar in almost every respect. This extends even to the peculiar attitudes that some of the artists must have placed themselves in. He states that “some must have painted while lying prone on their chests or sideways, and on their backs inside narrow or low fissures; an average sized European could not have painted some of the pictures which are in difficult positions. Many are ten and sixteen feet above ground level.”

In addition to artistic instincts, the wild people possessed a faculty—it might almost be termed an additional sense—of which Europeans are destitute. They could make their way in a straight line to any place where they had been before. Even a child nine or ten years of age, removed from its parents to a distance of several days' journey, and without opportunity of carefully observing the features of the country traversed, could months later return unerringly. They could give no explanation of the means by which they accomplished a task seemingly so difficult. Many of the inferior