A brief history of physical anthropology in Southern Africa is presented. Beginning with early accounts of settlers and visitors, detailed consideration of early and subsequent fossil discoveries and the individuals involved is given. A discussion of studies on the living peoples of Southern Africa follows and includes a historical summary of research on the interrelationships among Khoisan and Negro peoples, race, growth, nutrition, and secular trends.The roots of physical anthropology in Southern Africa are nearly as old as the recording of history on these shores. From the earliest times, visitors and settlers were wont to record their impressions of the diverse indigenous peoples of these African subtropics. Their rudimentary observations provide a corpus of what we may call the protohistory of physical anthropology in Southern Africa: a review of this phase provides the first section of this essay and it will take the story up to 1877; 1877 may be recognized as the year of the birth of anthropology as a scientific discipline in Southern Africa. Subsequent to that landmark, the major events of the past century under the rubrics of various subdivisions of physical anthropology will be considered. A map of Southern Africa showing the locations of several of the major historical and paleoanthropological sites mentioned in the review is given in Figure 1.
THE PROTOHISTORY OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY (BEFORE 1877)Prior to 1877, most recorded data on the living peoples of the subcontinent were to be found in the annals of travelers, missionaries, and explorers. Some of the records go back to the Moslem geographers and merchants of the 10th to 14th centuries, who ventured down the east coast of Africa, well south of the equator, reaching at least 20°S, a t Sofala (later Nova Sofala in Mozambique). W. Hammond-Tooke (1908) reviewed some of the earlier contributions to anthropological work in his presidential address to Section F of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science in 1908. The writings of the very early Moslem travelers speak of two African peoples living along the East African littoral. There were the black Zenj or Zinj', who are thought to be progenitors of some of the Bantu-speaking peoples of southeast Africa and the yellow-skinned, click-speaking Waqwaq (or Wakwak), who were manifestly Khoisan peoples, although whether they were Khoikhoi (formerly known as Hottentots), San (previously Bushmen), or some other Khoisan group is not certain. The Zenj were encountered as far south as Sofala from the tenth century to the beginning of the sixteenth century. It would be wrong to infer from these writings of the earlier chroniclers that clickusing Bantu-speakers, such as the Zulu and Xhosa, were at that time no farther south than Sofala. Indeed, the latter view, as expressed for instance in W. HammondTooke's (1908) address and by George McCall Theal (19191, must be considered entirely false in the light of later historical and especially archeological research. The growth of knowledge in ...
