OLDEST RACE DOOMED

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1004, 21 June 1930, Page 12

OLDEST RACE DOOMED

NATIVES OF KALAHARI DESERT VISIT BY SCIENTISTS The oldest race of people in the world —older even than the Australian aborigine—is doomed. A race which lives today in exactly the same way as man did in prehistoric times is fighting its last, battle with fate in the mightly wilderness of Africa’s Kalahari Desert (says a writer in an overseas paper). ' Scientists who lately visited these remnants of Stone Age humanity in the midst of what settlers picturesquely call the Great Thirst, say that the Masarwas, or Bushmen, will have perished utterly before another halfcentury, possibly before another 25 years pass. Sorrowing scientists now make known that there is no longer any question of reviving the vitality of these people. It seems certain that they are doomed and all science can do is to learn from the Masarwas how men actually lived 100,000 years ago. Not very long ago the world was astonished by the revelations of a famous Frenchman, the Abbe Breuil, who found wonderfully beautiful and accurate carvings and painting of extinct animals on the walls of certain caves in Spain. After all the ages that had passed since the days when the prehistoric little hunters of Southern Europe dropped their primitive brushes and flint tools, those drawings on the stone faces of subterranean caverns were as clear and as vividly coloured as on the forgotten morning when they were finished. Information of this and similar prehistoric finds was presently transmitted to Africa, where local research workers, after having compared copies of these petroglyphs with many existing in their own country, made the remarkable announcement that the race that accomplished such work in Europe -when mankind was young actually survived in Africa. No sooner had this assertion been put before men of learning than they took a new and immeasurably increased interest in the Masarwas. Until then they had merely been considered one of the world’s most primitive tribes, but now it is realised that, they provide the only pure-blooded link between ourselves and the dim era preceding the Aryans’ arrival in Europe.

Three thousand to four thousand of these people, with their astonishingly long pedigree, are the only genuine, uncontaminated survivars of the Stone Age to be found on earth -today. During the last ten years white observers have witnessed whole clans disappear, almost to the last man, and there is nothing to show that this dying out can be stopped. Dwarfs of Terror Only a few centuries back Africa gave the Bushmen a very different setting. Instead of being an obscure remnant of a nation among 200,000,000 other folk, they were found and feared everywhere between Egypt and the Cape of Good Hope, with their tiny bows and snake-poisoned arrows, their inaudible slinking, treacherous fashion of coming and going, and slaying all men who roused their anger. The dark, shrivelled dwarfs awoke the terror of all Africans, black, white and brown. This ferocious attitude to all other races of mankind ultimately brought about their destruction. When Europeans settled in Africa, the harrying and systematic killing off of the Bushmen started. The little fellows came out of the mountains to the frontier ports and homesteads of the colonists, stealing cattle, killing the white farmers and their servants. They surprised hunting parties camped amid the bush, and invariably killed every stranger who could be reached by their unerring, tiny arrows. Poisoned Arrows Six inches was the length of most of these arrows, yet so venomous was the liquid into which they were dipped—compounded of rotten meat, snake poison, and secret vegetable mixtures unknown to modern science —that anyone whose flesh w'as even grazed by the fearful missiles was straightway given up as doomed. Small wonder that in the grim pioneering days of this continent, when settlers had to fight their way against barbarous Bantus and wild animals across the veldt in an effort to make a new dominion the bushmen were shot clown like dangerous beasts by the newcomers. Not only did the European settlers kill these “Ishmaels of the desert,” but other native tribes likewise considered them as their natural, permanent foes. Against rifles and modern weapons the Masarwas’ stone age arms proved futile. Their numbers in all parts of the continent diminished until, at the beginning of the present century, only a few thousands remained.

All the good land, all the green hunting grounds, where they had killed the game on which they lived since time immemorial, was taken for farms by the new inhabitants of the country, and the unfortunate, untameable fighters took their last stand amid the sandy prairies of the great Kalahari wilderness. Attempts to befriend and civilise them have been made repeatedly, but they will never make peace. As recently as 1920 Mr. Van Ryneveld, a magistrate administering justice over one of the frontier districts within which the Bushmen survive, was shot dead with a poisoned arrow while he tried to settle

I one of their grievances. Scores of European prospectors, explorers, policemen and hunters have been found dead in the country where these irreconcilables hold sway. No wonder that the Bushman reserves are hardly ever visited by Europeans, even today. Hunting Sense These small, incredibly shrivelled black people are able -to smell water twenty miles away, just as an animal does. Every white hunter in Africa yearns for a Bushman tracker, who can accurately tell the chances of catching a wild beast from its footprints in the mud. Ever since the Bushmen were identified as being “-the next of kind” to the Stone Age folk, science has* been able to explain many of their habits and customs. Having been driven from their beloved mountain country by the pressure of their enemies, the Bushmen can no longer live in caves, but throughout great areas of Africa one finds magnificent pictures painted on the walls of those rock dwellings where they formerly dwelt. 160 Years Old

Marsarwas attain ages which other nations would refuse to credit. Arie a slightly civilised Bushman frequenting the neighbourhood of Middleburg. Cape Province, was authentically proved to be 160 years old. His record is by no means unequalled. Accurate figures are usually unobtainable, but by comparing the testimony of several white centenarians, all of whom remembered Arie only as a verj venerable man. it became possible to make a reliable estimate. Between the Auob and the Nasob Rivers a tract of country will be kept for the Bushmen. There the dwindling race may last some extra years Scientists hope to obtain sufficient phonograph records of their language cinema films of their customs, and colour photographs of their appear ance to preserve fully the records of these Stone Age survivors. Uniquely accurate replicas of their physical build were secured by the Cape Town Museum which, not contenting itself with modelled clay figures found in other collections, actually made casts from the living bodies of a number of Bushmen and their wives. Very few white men will succeed in gaining the friendship of the Marsarwas to such an extent that this can be repeated. In all parts of Africa investigators are trying to preserve some data of these links with a past that can upver come back.