n has been traced between the Bushmen and the Pygmy peoples
inhabiting the forests of Central Africa. Though the matter cannot be
regarded as definitely settled, the latest researches rather tend to
discredit this view. In fact it would appear that the two peoples have
little in common save diminutive proportions and a nomadic and predatory
form of existence. Owing to the discovery of steatopygous figurines in
Egyptian graves, a theory has been advanced that the Egyptians of the early
dynasties were of the same primitive pygmy negroid stock as the Bushmen.
But this is highly speculative. The physical characteristics of Egyptian
skulls have nothing of the Bushman in them. Of the primitive pygmy negroid
stock the Hottentots (_q.v._), once considered the parent family, are now
regarded as an offshoot of mixed Bantu-Bushman blood from the main Bushman
race.

It seems probable that the Bushmen must be regarded as having extended
considerably to the north of the area occupied by them within the memory of
white men. Evidence has been produced of the presence of a belated
Hottentot or Hottentot-Bushman group as far north as the district between
Kilimanjaro and Victoria Nyanza. They were probably driven south by the
Bantu tribes, who eventually outflanked them and confined them to the less
fertile tracts of country. Before the arrival of Europeans in South Africa
the Bushman race appears to have been, what it so essentially is to-day, a
nomadic race living in widely scattered groups. The area in which the
Bushmen are now found sporadically may be defined as extending from the
inner ranges of the mountains of Cape Colony, through the central Kalahari
desert to near Lake Ngami, and thence north-westward to the districts about
the Ovambo river north of Damaraland. In short, they have been driven by
European and Kaffir encroachments into the most barren regions of South
Africa. A few remain in the more inaccessible parts of the Drakensberg
range about the sources of the Vaal. Only in one or two districts are they
found in large numbers, chiefly in Great Bushman Land towards the Orange
river. A regularly planned and wholesale destruction of the Bushmen on the
borders of Cape Colony in the earlier years of European occupation reduced
their numbers to a great extent; but this cruel hunting of the Bushmen has
ceased. In retaliation the Bushmen were long the scourge of the farms on
the outer borders of the colony, making raids on the cattl