important than the graphic. Again, the obscurity in which the African Stone Age
cultures lie has by no means yet been dispelled, and we are thrown back on hypo-
theses and reconstructions much more than is the case even in Europe.

Hunting and collecting tribes are still to be found in Africa. To them belong above
all the scattered Pygmies of the rain-forests of central Africa, light-skinned, bright-
eyed dwarf peoples, who must once have formed a connected, even if somewhat loosely
organized population, but who were split up by later arrivals of other peoples and
harassed by them, and whose remnants were driven back into the region of the im-
penetrable tropical forest. Here they still support their very meagre existence, having
been cut off from the rich game reserves of the savannahs, and thus forced more and
more to gather bulbs and tubers.

The Pygmies, who are thus still a pre-Negro race, have no artistic heritage at all,
and even rock paintings are lacking. As these people make no use of stone as a ma-
terial, in sharp contrast to the other Stone Age hunters and collectors, it is even sug-
gested that the Stone Age is preceded here by a more primitive Wood Age.

Other, more advanced hunting races, also in tribes of varying sizes, are found
throughout the broad expanses of the saltpans and dry grass-lands of Africa. It looks
as if they form part of an originally unified order of hunting peoples, who at some time
now unidentifiable may have arrived from the north-east. We must not, of course,
think of such migrations as being sudden single actions; rather is it to be taken that
hunting tribes must have come to Africa across immense reaches of time, spread out
over the continent in the best game regions, and formed eventually a racially and
culturally more or less uniform population.

In all probability most of the old rock pictures already mentioned may be ascribed
to these more highly developed hunting cultures. In addition to these, however, many
cultural elements from this layer still survive, even where the farming cultures of the
Negroes have overlain them, and they are to be recognized in rites, myths and religious
beliefs. This is particularly so in the case of totemistic ideas, which are continually to
be met with in African peasant culture as typical reminiscences of hunting civilization.
The animal representations of Negro art frequently refer either to still living or to
wholly forgotten and re-interpreted totemism.

Hunting tribes belonging to this ancient complex of hunting plainsmen today live
in the southern part of the continent, where it has become usual to refer to them as
Bushmen. They are not Negroes, any more than the Pygmies. Even if very little is
known about their origins we know that, with their lighter skins, their stunted growth
and other distinguishing features, they belong to some other pre-Negro race. In the
course of centuries the Bushmen were forced farther and farther into the broad and arid
regions of the South African saltpan, the Kalahari, by the pastoral peoples (the Hot-
tentots!) who moved into the same areas, and finally by the Europeans who usurped
South Africa with great thoroughness. The Bushmen's social and cultural patterns
degenerated, and slipped back to the level of a primitive hunting civilization. Finally,
indeed, many of the old independent hunters became common cattle-thieves.

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