The Black Man's Place in South Africa by Peter Nielsen
page 5 of 94 (05%)
page 5 of 94 (05%)
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remaining like the animals entirely controlled by it. This wonderful
brain also made possible the communication and tradition of his experiences and ideas through articulate speech by which means his successors in each generation were able to keep and develop the slowly spelt lessons of human life. Are the African Natives as far removed from the beasts as the Europeans, and do they share equally with the Europeans this great human distinction of ability to think? The belief, at, one time commonly held, that in morphological development and physical appearance the Bantu stand nearer in the scale of evolution to our common ape-like ancestors than do the white people does not seem to be warranted by facts. Careful investigations by trained observers all over the world have shown that the various simian features discernible in the anatomy of modern man are found fairly evenly distributed amongst advanced and backward races. The so-called prognathism of the Bantu has been cited as a racial mark denoting comparative nearness to the brutes, but when it is noted that anthropologists differ among themselves as to what constitutes this feature, whether it is to be measured from points above or below the nose or both, and when we are informed in some text books that while the negroes are prognathous, bushmen must be classed with Europeans as being the opposite, that is, orthognathous,[1] and when, added to this, we learn from other quarters that white women are, on the average, more prognathous than white men,[2] then the significance of this distinction, which in any case is not regarded as being relative to cranical capacity, is seen to be more apparent than real. |
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