456 STRAXDLOOPER INSTRUMENTS AND ORNAMENTS. 



compared with the so-called Neolithic types of that country. 



But in South Africa, so far as I know, there is no strati- 

 graphical evidence indicating their antiquity, for they are recorded 

 only from surface sites. Nevertheless, the pygmy culture differs 

 in technique as well as in size from that so frequently found on 

 surface sites in the Eastern Karroo. I have seen hundreds of 

 end-scrapers scattered over the slopes of a stony hillside on the 

 farm Cossackpost, near Rosmead, and many others from central 

 districts of the Cape, but none of them like the small rounded 

 scrapers from Wilton, many of which are bevelled at both ends, 

 and broader than long. The Cossackpost specimens, being made 

 of lydianite, and often showing no signs of weathering, are pre- 

 sumably fairly recent, and may reasonably be referred to the 

 "Bushmen" who frequented that region a little more than a 

 century ago. 



If the pygmy crescents and scrapers also belong to the Bushman 

 race, as now seems equally probable, the two techniques may 

 belong to distinct branches thereof, contemporaneous or otherwise. 

 That such differentiation within the race did exist seems to me 

 a valid deduction from the distribution data, even after making 

 considerable allowance for local variations and developments of 

 technique, for Dr. Peringuey tells us that bevelled scrapers are 

 seldom found in the Western part of the Colony, yet they abound 

 in the Karroo and are met with in the Orange Free State, Griqua- 

 land West, and southern parts of the Transvaal. Such bevelled 

 scrapers are the characteristic elements of the implement assembly 

 at Cossackpost, and the same are figured by Johnson from Modder 

 River. 



Or, again, differences in actual size of implements may 

 possibly betoken the sex of the maker. According to Dr. 

 Kannemeyer, who claims to have learned the fact from more than 

 one person intimately acquainted with Bushmen, it was 1'sually 

 the women who made the stone implements, but the arrow 

 straighteners, and doubtless all the weapons, were made by men. 

 The large implements used for what may be called domestic pur- 

 poses, such as grinding, weights for digging sticks, etc., are often 

 found in the springs; they were too heavy to carry about, and 

 the Bushmen consequently hid them in the springs or in stores. 

 It was a Bushman custom to fill up and cover over the springs 

 to conceal them from white men. 1 



Thus, it should not be assumed that the implements found 

 in a well-filled rock-shelter, or any other aboriginal site, actually 

 affords a complete representation of the tribal workmanship. 



On the aboriginal sites of the Free State and the Transvaal 

 there have also been found two groups of scrapers, contrasting in 

 size, in reference to which P. P. Johnson wrote: "Mons. Rutot 

 judging from my figures, suggests that the Riet and Modder group 

 of solutric implements are Aurignacian, and that the Taaibosch 

 group corresponds to a late phase of the solutric stage of West 

 Europe, which he terms pre-Tardenoisian, and which is charac- 



i "Man.," 1907, No. 35, p. 50. 



