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The Black Man's Place in South Africa by Peter Nielsen
page 5 of 94 (05%)
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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