Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
animal fi gures in some of the paintings may be direct evidence of the antiq-
uity of the dances that I saw, in which people take on the properties of ani-
mals. Or they may represent animist religious traditions that have now largely
been lost.
The oldest San paintings that can be dated with certainty are in the Drak-
ensberg Range in eastern South Africa, but paint chips buried in the soil near
the paintings may be centuries older. The paintings from which these buried
chips come, along with unknown numbers of generations of earlier paint-
ings, have been destroyed by weathering.
There are also tantalizing hints of an astonishingly ancient San artistic
tradition. A rock with bits of ocher paint adhering to it has been found in a
cave near South Africa's coast. The soil layer in which the rock was embed-
ded comes from a stratum dated at more than 20,000 years before the pres-
ent. And, in a cave in Namibia near Africa's dry southwest coast, German
archeologists have found fragments of paintings that were fi rst tentatively
dated at 28,000 years ago. It now appears that the paintings may be much
more recent.
4
Even if these oldest dates are wrong, it is clear that the San have an ancient
artistic tradition. Their ef orts to depict the world around them certainly pre-
cede any sustained contacts with cultures from the north. The San have also
developed sophisticated hunting weapons and decorative arts. In general,
their cultural developments show remarkable parallels with those that were
taking place further to the north in Africa and in Europe.
Parallel cultures and the overthrow of Eurocentrism
The parallel development of cultures is a theme that emerges repeatedly as
we examine the history of our species. Paleoanthropologists study human
prehistory through the fossil record and cultural artifacts. The founders
of this fi eld, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, concen-
trated their ef orts on Europe—not surprisingly, since they happened to be
Europeans and they were surrounded by conveniently situated European
archeological sites. Much ef ort was put into investigating the cultures of the
