LAST TRIBE OF PRIMITIVE CAVE DWELLERS FOUND

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 13, Issue 24, 24 November 1948, Page 3

LAST TRIBE OF PRIMITIVE CAVE DWELLERS FOUND

The discovery of a lost tribe in the wild Brandberg Mountains of South-West Africa is exciting the interest of anthropologists. For these quaint cave-dwellers —the strandlopers, hitherto associated with the south-east coast of Africa—had been recorded as extinct three centuries ago, writes C. F. Stanley. The strandlopers preceded the Bushmen, who in turn were to be dispersed by the onward march of the Hottentots ' from the west and the Kaffirs from the east. Skeleton remains on the strandlopers have been found in the caves and dolments of the east coast. Now it is known for certain that some still exist. Colonel P. I. Hoogenhout, Administrator of South-West Africa for the Union Government, has, indeed, met and examined five of the tribe. First news of the lost people was given by a Hottentot chief who came out of the arid Namib Desert to Zessfortein, a remote fort built by the Germans prior to the First World War, and reported their existence. On Colonel Hoogenhout’s orders, the chief sent men out into the Brandbergs to bring back some of the tribe to pay their respects to the Administrator. “Five of them turned up,” says Colonel Hoogenhout. “They were very small, with matted hair.” 6 Step by step, details of the life of these lost people, of whom only 50 have so far been found, has been built up. Their homes are the natural cave formations of the Brandberg mountains, already famous for. prehistoric rock paintings, which may now prove to be the work of the strandlopers themselves. Though the mountains have been explored many times in the past in search. of these paintings no trace has ever been found hitherto of any recent human habitation. These pigmies are obviously among the most primitive people ever discovered alive. It has been definitely established that they can count up only to two; most other primitive peoples can count up to the number of their fingers. But in many other ways they resemble the tiny bushmen. Like the bushmen, for instance, these strandlopers are nomadic hunters using the most primitive bows and arrows; though, so far. there is no suggestion that the bushman method of hunting, in which poison is used on the arrow tips and the poisoned part afterwards cut out of the dead animal before cooking, is also in use by the Brandberg pigmies. Apart from the game of the mountains the pigmies live on field mice, lizards, and insects collected by the women, and they* are known to make periodic visits to the coast to collect shellfish which they cook in the ashes of a dying fire. They make fire in the stone age manner by twirling one stick in a hole in a thicker stick, and they buy their wives with salt, which they collect from the evaporation of sea water.

The authorities believe that these 50 people are the last remains of strandlopers who moved westwards from the east coast hundreds of years ago. But the fact that even so small a tribe could live and move about the Namib Desert, reach the sea coast to collect their food and salt, and remain undetected over the centuries is a puzzling factor.