V.—On an African Occurrence of Fossil Mammalia Associated with stone Implements

Extract

Stone implements have long been known to occur in South Africa, but nearly all the recorded discoveries have, until quite recently, been made at the Cape. Indeed, it is only lately that the subject has attracted much attention, and that the circumstances of their occurrence have been at all fully investigated. Even now there is little precise information on the point, and yet it is essential to the solution of the problems they present. For, as one of us has previously pointed out, in attempting to ascribe to their proper source the stone implements found in South Africa, we are confronted with difficulties that are unknown in Europe. Not only has the country been inhabited down to the present day by tribes like the ‘Bushmen’ unacquainted with the working of metals, and whose origin probably long antedates the earliest Egyptian civilisation, but we find stone still employed by the Bantu for certain purposes, and in Rhodesia the question is still further complicated by the existence of numerous ruins built by an unknown race possessing a considerable degree of barbaric culture, but still employing primitive types of stone implements. Geological evidence is therefore more than usually necessary, but, when there is any, it is frequently very ambiguous owing to the characters of the superficial deposits. More often than not it is altogether lacking, the great majority of the implements found having been picked up on the surface. Colonel Feilden some time ago pointed out the probability of certain of the Zambezi implements being of vast antiquity, and one of us had already formed a similar opinion in the course of a brief visit to the Victoria Falls.