The discovery of these forest Pygmies has directed attention to the Bushmen of South Africa, a desert-dwelling race, long known though comparatively little regarded in their ethnological significance. They are now by many regarded as an outlying branch of the forest Pygmies, the chief difference being in the shape of the skull, which is rather long in the Bushmen, rather short in the Pygmies. These degraded wanderers inhabit an area extending from the inner ranges of the mountains of Cape Colony, through the central Kalahari desert, to near Lake Ngami, and thence northwestward to the Ovambo River. Into these, the most barren portions of the South African deserts, they have been driven by the encroachments of Kaffirs, Hottentots, and Europeans.
They closely resemble the Akka tribes of the north, averaging about four and a half feet in height, and possessing deep-set, crafty eyes, small and depressed nose, and a generally repulsive countenance. Their complexion is of a dirty yellow. Their hair grows in small, woolly tufts. In the vicinity of Lake Ngami, Livingstone found them to be of larger stature and darker color, while Baines measured some in this region who were five feet six inches in height. In disposition the Bushmen are strikingly wild, malicious, and intractable, while their cerebral development is classed by Humboldt as belonging to almost the lowest class of the human species.
Close in affinity with the Bushmen, and in various respects unlike the dark races around them, are the Hottentots, the original inhabitants of Cape Colony, a race of herdsmen who are much superior in culture to the degraded desert nomads. They are not dwarfish, being of medium stature, but they resemble the Bushmen in complexion, in which and in general cast of features they present some similarity to the Chinese. Their hair, like that of the Bushmen, grows in tufts, with spaces between, and they are like them in language, their method of speech consisting largely in a series of clicking sounds. Their manner of talking has been compared to the clucking of a hen, and by the Dutch to the "gobbling of a turkeycock." The Hottentots present every appearance of being a developed branch of the Pygmy family, or the result of a cross between Bushmen and negroes.
These tribes of dwarfs, now extended throughout the equatorial forests and over the South African deserts, were probably once far more widespread, inhabiting much of the continent and reaching as far as Madagascar, where a branch of them, known as Kinios or Quinias, are thought still to exist. They extended north to the Mediterranean, and have left their representatives in Morocco in a tribe of dwarfs, about four feet high, who differ widely in appearance from all other people of that country. As to their origin, there is a diversity of opinion. Some anthropologists look upon them as a primeval race, distinct from the negroes, who came among them later. Professor Virchow, on the contrary, is of the opinion that their only important difference from the negroes is that of size, and regards them as the remains of a primitive population from whom the negroes have descended.
In a preceding section a statement was made as to what was the probable general appearance of the man-ape. It was based upon the physical aspect of the Pygmies, whom we hold to form the immediate derivative of man's ape ancestor, and to have made no radical change in personal appearance, if we may judge from the various ape-like characteristics which they still present. Mentally they have made a very considerable advance, and have reached the stage of men of low intellectual powers; but while their brains have been growing their bodies have not greatly changed, and the marks of their origin are thick upon them. There has probably been little change in size, the diminutive stature and small bodily dimensions being in accord with their incessant activity, while the difficulties of traversing the thick growth of the tropical forest may have helped to keep them small. As it is, they are of about half the size of civilized man, the weight of a full grown adult male being probably not over ninety pounds.
Taking the Pygmies as a whole, it may be said that, though many of the Akkas are disproportionate in shape and tottering in gait, on the whole these people are well made, their protuberant paunch being probably a result of their habits of eating. Captain Guy Burrows says that a Pygmy will eat twice as much as would suffice a full-grown man, and that one of them will devour a whole stalk of bananas at a meal, with other food. Some tribes are described as physically and mentally degenerate, and prognathism is in many cases strongly declared, the lower part of the face having an ape-like contour, and the protruding chin, that feature peculiar to man, being very deficient. In their great abdominal development the adult Akkas resemble the children of Arabs and negroes. This, therefore, seems the retention of a primitive feature which has become a passing characteristic in the more advanced types of mankind.
The Pygmies are not destitute of intelligence, and are capable of receiving some of the elements of education. Two of them were brought to Italy about 1875, who within two years' time learned to read and write and to speak Italian with much fluency. They showed themselves superior in school studies to European children of ten or twelve years of age, and one of them became somewhat proficient in music. In their habits they resembled children, being sensitive and impulsive, fond of play, and very quick in their motions. Their readiness in gaining the elements of education is in accord with experience in the case of other savages. It is when studies requiring abstruse thought are reached that the facility in acquisition of the savage races comes to an end.
With this consideration of the characteristics and habitat of the Pygmies we may proceed to a review of their habits. The weapons which they seem to have developed during their long upward progress, and to which their supremacy over the wild beasts of the forest is probably due, consist of two, the bow and arrow and the spear. The bow and arrow are small and insignificant in appearance, and would be of little value but for the poison which the Pygmies have somehow learned how to obtain, and which makes them dreaded, not only by beasts, but by men. Wherever found, from the deserts of the south to the forest of the Welle and Aruwimi on the north, the poisoned arrow is a mark of affinity as decided in its way as their physical resemblance. Its wide distribution goes to indicate that it was the general weapon of the Pygmies ages ago, when, presumably, they had all Africa for their own, and ruled supreme over the animal world in that continent.
It is true, indeed, that the use of the poisoned arrow is not peculiar to them, but is a somewhat common possession of savage tribes in all parts of the earth. This makes it quite possible that it was not original with the Pygmies, but was derived by them from other tribes. On the other hand, in view of its great value in giving them supremacy over the lower animals, it may well have been a primeval Pygmy invention, and these tribes the original source of its existing wide distribution.
They possess more than one poison; one being a dark substance of the color and consistence of pitch, which is supposed to be made out of a species of arum. It is laid in the splints of their wooden arrows, or spread thickly upon their iron arrowheads, when they possess these. Another poison is of a pale glue color, which is supposed by Stanley to be made of crushed red ants. When fresh these poisons are deadly, producing excessive faintness, palpitation of the heart, nausea, and deep pallor, soon followed by death. In Stanley's experience one man died within a minute, from a mere pin prick in the breast. Others lived during different intervals, extending up to one hundred hours. The difference in virulence seems to have depended on the degree of freshness of the venom, which apparently lost its strength as it became dry.