ANCIENT MAN IN AFRICA AND JAVA 255 
White Nile. The remains of those people have been 
recently described by Dr Douglas Derry.^ As in modern 
negroes of the same region, lip ornaments were worn, 
and in the women the lower incisor teeth were extracted. 
The discovery is important in this respect : it shows us 
that three thousand or four thousand years ago a tall 
negro type was in existence, and inhabited this part of 
the Soudan, practising the same bodily mutilations as 
their modern successors. 
The next point in our journey from Egypt to . the 
Cape takes us to German East Africa. In 19 14, Dr 
Hans Reck discovered in a stratified deposit at Oldoway, 
in the northern part of German East Africa, a human 
skeleton, in the contracted posture, and exhibiting all the 
features of a typical negro. The stratum in which the 
skeleton lay — one composed of calcareous sand — contained 
remains of extinct animals of the Pleistocene period. 
The antiquity of the skeleton is probably not so great as 
the stratum in which it lay, for a complete human 
skeleton laid in a contracted posture signifies a burial, 
unless the opposite can be proved — or, at least, unless a 
natural entombment can be rendered probable. The 
teeth were artificially pointed by having been filed — a 
custom still prevalent among negro tribes of East Africa. 
It is very probable that the negro was fully evolved in 
early Pleistocene times, but the evidence from Oldoway 
cannot be accepted as having finally proved this degree 
of antiquity.'-^ 
So far as concerns ancient man, South Africa is dis- 
tinctly a land of the greatest promise. In recent years 
several announcements of the discovery of ancient human 
remains have been made, but, so far, no full and authentic 
details have been made public. In his presidential 
address to the Royal Society of South Africa, Dr L. 
Peringuey discussed the evidence relating to the antiquity 
of man in South Africa. He could not show the fossil 
1 See Proc. of Seventeenth htternat. Congress of Medicine, London, 
191 3. Sec. I : Anat. and Embryology, pt. 2, p. 99. 
- See Illustrated London News, April 4th, 1914. 
