Aurignacian or Magdalenian, they are exposed on the surface, or occur in shell mounds or in rock-shelters. They are found, occasionally also with more ancient types, on the floor of huge sand-dunes by the sea-coast, when these are exposed and bared, to be no less periodically covered again, by the boisterous prevailing winds. They are common near the water-places called here "fonteins," i.e., springs, and mostly always near to, or in, depressions where rain-water accumulates in the season: the "vleis," or "pans" of South Africa. When of a more ancient type, Chellean-Mousterian, they are bedded in alluvial deposits, often very deeply. They occur in numbers on the talus of mountains and high hills. They are met with, but then mostly singly, in the exposed banks of rivers; occasionally they are found on the surface, or where river terraces occur which, however, are not proved to be old. Often also they are found singly, where no trace of land erosion is perceptible or traceable, unless we go back to early pliocene-this showing plainly that their presence there is purely accidental. The material is always a rock of hard texture; no implement made from a flint nodule has as yet been found, because the material does not exist in South Africa. The hardest stone occurring locally or at some distance off has been selected for the large and small implements. It is Table Mountain sandstone (more or less quartzitic), Karroo quartzite, dolerite, lydianite, or shale indurated by the intrusion of dolerite, surface quartzite of various textures, cherty sandstone, Dwyka chert, banded jasper, diabase, agate, and chalcedony, white quartz either sugary or transparent, even granite. Implements made of green bottle and white plate glass have also been found. It happens not unfrequently that implements are met with in situations where the rock of which they are made is known to be absent. Barter may account for their presence there, but it is most likely that they were carried and left where found by owners of migratory or roaming habits or dispositions, clan-forming aborigines that have disappeared, leaving behind them, however, these artefacts as a testimony to their former existence. It soon becomes plain, even after a superficial examination, that the making of implements of forms so various cannot have been simultaneous. The technique is too dissimilar, the general facies also. Next to the scraper-knife flaked off a hard stone for a passing want and probably discarded immediately after, we find a laurel leafshaped lance-head worked by careful secondary trimming on either side and of nearly pure Solutrian type; a "coup de poing" of a finish. equal to the best Acheulean. We have a cleaving-stone surpassing the best Mousterian; a rude, irregular stone with cutting edges fixed with a gum-cement to a wooden handle in the manner obtaining among the Australian aborigines; arrows, the cutting or piercing heads of which is obtained by minute chips set in a triangular piece of similar gum-cement, a few arrow-heads with tang, worked on both sides; and a ground axe of neolithic type are also recorded. The evolution in the manufacture of these tools took probably a very long time in South Africa, as elsewhere. I have already expressed my belief, based on purely antiquarian grounds, and according to the tenets of the classification generally accepted, that "we have in South Africa evidence of two periods: a paleolithic and a recent one, which I hesitated to term neolithic; but that there is no evidence as to the time when the former was replaced by the latter, and moreover, that this point will remain for long conjectural." In a word, a very ancient race had peopled Africa at the palæolithic stage. One or more races have supervened, possibly absorbed the former, and perhaps replaced it. Unfortunately, neither geology nor palæontology has been able to give us, so far, a clue to the possible age of the South African finds. The question is still more complicated owing to material of a paleæolithic type of the highest finish, as well as of ruder kind, having been found in valleys where old river terraces cannot be traced, as well as where river terraces exist, or are said to exist. Then, alongside of these we have implements quite modern, as will be seen subsequently, and yet so primitive in appearance that one can excuse, yet not agree with, those antiquarians who, requiring a beginning to everything, have postulated that thorny subject an "eolithic" age preceding or accompanying the "Strepyan." Nor does the difference in composition of the material of which the implements are made help us to elucidate the point of antiquity. A hand-pick of dolerite will be weathered to a stage of unrecognition, while a quartzite one will, during the same time, merely acquire a patina, or polish; a chert or banded jasper tool will remain almost as fresh as when made, while a diabasic one will become deeply pitted or smoothed under similar conditions. Eolian agencies have also to be taken into serious consideration, in a country where desiccation has been in progress, especially in the "The Stone Age in South Africa," in "Science in South Africa," Cape Town, 1905, a publication prepared for the visit of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The present paper is an enlargement of the necessarily highly condensed précis I then gave of our knowledge of the question. north-western part, from probably the beginning of the quaternary period. Great, almost unsurmountable, therefore are the difficulties fronting the Antiquarian in South Africa: first, because geology and palæontology fail him in affording precise indications of an old period from which deductions other than speculative might be drawn; secondly, because the Stone Age is not yet an age of the past, or if so, it ended yesterday; thirdly, because, with one exception, there is no evidence of a Polished or Ground Stone period having replaced the former and preceded a Bronze or Iron Age as in the Palearctic Region. The only resource left to him is to turn to the comparative study of the implements themselves, but he is soon led to conclude, on lithological grounds, that these South African implements do not fit in with the classification that answers to the requirements of, and is founded upon, the evidence obtained in Europe. The latter classification is based on stratigraphical and palæontological evidence, and it depends also on certain industries which unfortunately did not extend to South Africa. Classifications are made to be unmade when new discoveries occur. But it is not possible to make the known South African finds fit in with the classifications of Mortillet or of other authors. There is, moreover, a chain of evidence being slowly forged which points to a resemblance between implements from the Old and those of the New World. This similarity of form is so striking that it makes the Antiquarian pause when he considers the question of the possible identity of the races of mankind that manufactured these implements. Nor is he easy in his mind that this lithic industry is not the result of causes due to the growing intellectual power of man, affecting people in widely distant countries at the same or different times. He has then to call the Anthropologist and the Ethnologist to his aid. In spite of the fact that a community of races is not implied. by a like condition of culture, the Philologist may also be asked to add his quota, although his great error is, and has always been, to "treat a communicable character as an inborn gift." Thus reduced merely to a lithological comparison, the study of the South African implements might appear to prove barren of results. But it is not so. The Chellean type is the Chellean type of the Palearctic and other regions. This is indubitable. But the types * The Magdalenian, connected with the reindeer, and perhaps late on with the stag, is a case in point. that might correspond with the Aurignacian, Solutrian, and Magdalenian cultures, especially the last, have an indescribable facies of their own which may be said to be South African. On the other hand, the "pygmy " implements, and others with the "bord abattut of the French, cannot be very readily distinguished from the English, French, and Indian implements of the same type, except, of course, by the material of which they are made; but they more closely approximate the Algerian and Morocco examples. The South African Aurignacian or Magdalenian type, may have been, and probably was, as old as that of the corresponding period of Europe; but it has outlived it. The "pygmy" culture lasted in the Cape Colony until the sixties of the last century, or thereabouts, and is lasting still in the Kalahari.* Truly we have not here a definite line of separation between the artefacts that are hacked stones or those that are polished stones, in so far as concerns weapons or tools that might have been used as weapons; but we have here an abundance of household utensils that might prove a counterpart to the age of the polished stone, but which have a facies eminently South African. This peculiar feature of what I prefer, rightly or wrongly, to term the South African Neolithic type is that, although for certain purposes stones were polished, yet it cannot be said that an attempt was made to make the weapons of the same period more serviceable or more effective by this polishing or grinding process. There is thus a big hiatus in the evolution of South African stone implements. * We find it connected also in some Cape caves with large implements of paleolithic type. CHAPTER II. DIVISIONS OF THE PALEOLITHIC SERIES. EOLITHS. PALEOLITHS OF LARGE SIZE OTHER THAN SCRAPER-KNIVES. THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF SOUTH AFRICAN PALEOLITHIC IMPLEMENTS. In order to compare our South African series and make them synchronise with those met with elsewhere, it may not be out of place—in fact, it is necessary—to give here, but on broad lines, he generally accepted divisions of the Pleistocene, or ancient Quaternary. Whether they are justified or not for the South African implements, the general terms will prove useful; but whether these divisions as now accepted will prove provisional, in view of the later discoveries of human remains, is a question of the future. These divisions, beginning from the lowest, are: Strepyan Chellean Acheulean Mousterian Solutrian Magdalenian Another arrangement rejects the Strepyan and accepts the Chellean Acheulean Mousterian Aurignacian Solutrian Magdalenian Azilian |