metres higher than it is at present; in localities where considerable changes in the contour of the surface must have taken place since they were deposited; and at great depths in aeolian rock, where bones of animals and shells are also found.[1]
How long the boucher continued to be used cannot be ascertained, but at length better implements were formed. Possibly the first inhabitants had evolved by themselves something superior, or another section of people, having made an advance in knowledge somewhere else, migrated slowly to South Africa, and established new industries here. From this time forward the implements were formed, not of oval water-worn stones, but of pieces broken off a rock and then chipped into the required shapes. It might be a spearhead that was needed, or a scraper, or a chopper, or something to serve as a knife, all these could now be made. The arrowhead can hardly date back as far, for it implies a knowledge of the bow, an implement which must have been the product of much thought. But if the advance is due to immigration, not to native growth of knowledge, the bow may have been brought here by the newcomers, and the stone arrowheads found in great abundance be as ancient in South Africa as the knife or the unhafted axe.
- ↑ See the paper on The Antiquity of Man in South Africa, by George R. Mackay, Esqre., in the pamphlet No. 2 of Belangrijke Historische Dokumenten, published by me in Capetown in 1896. See also the numerous proofs given by Mr. G. W. Stow in his volume on The Native Races of South Africa, edited by me, and published in London in 1905. The most important volume on the subject yet published is The Stone Age of South Africa as represented in the Collection of the South African Museum, by L. Peringuey, D.Sc, Director of the Museum, a book of two hundred and eighteen pages 178 by 102 millimetres in size, with many inset plates and twenty-eight pages containing two hundred and eleven illustrations, published in London and Capetown in 1911. It was prepared by a man thoroughly qualified for writing it, one who has brought the anthropological section of the museum to its present high standard of usefulness. Dr. Peringuey is of opinion that the savages who made and used the earliest known stone implements had their first home in Africa and spread thence into Europe.
