ANTHROPOLOGY 603 



eating a mixture of raees. R. Elsdon-Dew eoneludes from his 

 studies in South Afriea (1934a, 1934b, 1935) that the Hottentot 

 may be a mixture of Hamite and Negro, with a variable propor- 

 tion of Bushman blood. His latest results on the Bantu are pub- 

 lished in a recent book (1937) in which he makes suggestions, based 

 on this line of research, regarding the early racial history of African 

 peoples as a whole. Blood-groups and their significance were dis- 

 cussed at the international anthropological congress in London 

 (Congres 1934), when it was concluded that results, to represent 

 a criterion in racial classification, must be correlated with other 

 physical characters which are equally valid. 



HISTORY AND MATERIAL CULTURE 



Interaction of races and cultures must have begun in Africa 

 during the Neolithic Age, say 3,000 B.C., but until the opening 

 of the modern epoch in African history in the seventeenth century, 

 when the Dutch occupied Table Bay and various European 

 nations established trading posts along the Guinea coast, written 

 records concerning Africa south of the Sahara were confined to 

 occasional references in Arabic literature. Accordingly deductions 

 as to the past five thousand years can, for the most part, be made 

 only from Africa as we see it to-day, from ascertained facts about 

 languages, racial types, domestic animals, cultivated plants, arti- 

 facts, ruins and native traditions. As in the case of the pre-history 

 of the continent, different interpretations have been put on the 

 discoveries made, and in most cases knowledge rests on hypothesis 

 rather than certainty. 



Taking these categories of evidence in the order set down 

 above, similarities of language have been used extensively in 

 piecing together historical events; as an example, the close resem- 

 blance between the different Bantu tongues and their relation- 

 ship to Sudanic is taken as an indication of a migration of peoples 

 from the north of the Bantu line. Thus a name for the domestic 

 fowl, Kuku, shared by many tribes, led Sir H. H.Johnston (1919) 

 to think that this migration followed the introduction of the bird 

 into Egypt from Persia in 525 B.C. Attempts have been made to 

 construct the original Bantu language on the assumption that the 



