CHAPTER III. 
HISTORY 
B RITISH CENTRAL AFRICA only comes within the domain of written 
history quite recently, Tanganyika and much of Nyasa scarcely forty 
years ago. It is just barely possible that the south end of Lake 
Nyasa, and it is certain that a portion of the river Shire which flows from 
it, were known to the Portuguese explorers at the latter end of the sixteenth 
century. The unwritten history, the history which can be deduced from 
researches into language, examinations of racial type, native traditions, and 
archaeological researches, extends back into the usual remoteness connected 
with the movements of the human genus, though in no part of the world 
is it so indefinite or is there such scanty and slight material on which to 
construct theories. 
It may be that something of this kind occurred. Until further facts 
come to light, the tendency of such little knowledge as we at present possess 
of the past history of the evolution of man is to lead us to believe that he 
was developed from the pithecoid type somewhere in Asia, not improbably in 
India. 1 It would seem, at any rate, as if the earliest known race of man, 
inhabiting what is now British Central Africa, was akin to the Bushman- 
Hottentot type of negro. Rounded stones, with a hole through the centre, similar 
to those which are used by the Bushmen in the south for weighting their 
digging sticks, have been found at the south end of Lake Tanganyika, and 
specimens of them were brought home thence by me and given to the British 
Museum. I have heard that other examples of these “ Bushman ” stones have 
been found nearer to Lake Nyasa, but I have not seen the alleged specimens. 
In one instance I alighted on a curious tradition, which would make it appear 
1 At any moment this theory, which at present holds the field, may be upset by unlooked-for 
discoveries in African paleontology. Quite recently a discovery of the most extraordinary importance 
and interest has been made by Dr. Forsyth Major in Madagascar, an island which was united to Africa 
in the early part of the tertiary epoch. This consists of the fossil remains of a monkey-like form called 
Nesopithecus , a form intermediate between the Cebidee and the Old World monkeys. The Cebidm are the 
American monkeys, a type which is connected with the Lemuroids by transitional forms. Mr. R. Lydekker 
deduces from these discoveries that the primal stock of the monkeys had its home in Africa; that from 
the African continent branched off the Cebidm, which found their way to America, and there lingered, 
while they became extinguished in the Old World; and the Simiidte, or Old World monkeys, which 
in turn gave rise to the anthropoid apes and man. So far as we yet know evidence preponderates in 
favour of the anthropoid apes having arisen in Southern Asia, whence they penetrated Africa; and the 
famous discovery by Dr. Dubois, in Java, of Pithecanthropus erectus , a form almost intermediate between 
the anthropoid ape and the human species, would lead us to imagine that man likewise originated in the 
Asiatic continent, which served as a distributing centre. The lowest known forms of man living 
at the present time, or only recently extinct, are found in Tasmania, Australia, South Eastern Asia, 
and Central and Southern Africa. At the same time further discoveries may equally well show that the 
development of the anthropoid ape into man took place in Africa, a guess once hazarded by Darwin. 
52 
I 
