Introduction 



from the little we know about it that as late as forty or fifty 

 thousand years ago it was still a well-watered region, serving 

 as a route between Syria, India, Persia and Africa, across 

 which travelled the giraffes, the anthropoid apes, the buffaloes, 

 many of the antelopes, the zebras and asses, and the early 

 t3rpes of Homo sapiens. Another path for the peopling of 

 Africa in the Pliocene and Pleistocene was the land connection 

 across the Mediterranean, the Italian land-route, which down 

 to some twenty to thirty thousand years ago cut the Mediter- 

 ranean in two and linked up Malta, Tripoli and Tunis with 

 Sicily and Italy. 



At no very remote period and well within the human era, 

 the mammals of Algeria, Morocco and Tunis resembled very 

 strongly those of Eastern and South Africa at the present 

 day. Much of the Sahara was then a shallow sea, but there 

 was the broad belt of land, the Tasili-Tibesti plateaux and 

 mountains, which connected Algeria and Tunis with the Central 

 Sudan. Across this diagonal mountainous area travelled 

 to east and south the white rhinoceros, the African elephant, 

 several of the antelopes, the buffalo with enormous horns 

 fourteen feet long {Bubalis antiquus), the eland and the 

 hyena. An even more important route in the advance of 

 the modern mammalian fauna over East and South Africa 

 was the valley of the Nile and the mountainous region east 

 of it, once directly connected with Arabia across the Red 

 Sea Rift valley. From Egjrpt and Abyssinia came contingents 

 of big and remarkable beasts, and probably the Negro and 

 Negroid types of man to journey southward to another great 

 scene of expansion : Trans-Zambezian Africa and Southern 

 Angola. 



South Africa, where, for the past hundred years, and more 



xxix 



