A History of the Colonization of Africa by Alien Races
Harry Johnston
9781465537997
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The theme of this book obviously deals rather with the invasion and settlement of Africa by foreign nations than with the movements of people indigenous in their present types to the African continent; nevertheless, it may be well to preface this sketch of the history of African colonization by a few remarks explaining the condition and inhabitants of the continent—so far as we can deduce them from indirect evidence—before it was subjected to invasion and conquest by races and peoples from Europe and Asia. In all probability man first entered Africa from the direction of Syria. He penetrated into tropical Africa in the train of those large mammals which still form the most striking feature in the African fauna; many of which however were evolved not in tropical Africa but in southern Europe or western Asia as well as in Egypt and Cis-Saharan Africa. These great apes, elephants, giraffes, and antelopes sought a refuge in tropical Africa not only from the cold of the glacial pleistocene, but from the incessant attacks of carnivorous man. Later on, but still in most remote times, there were (no doubt) migrations of European man from the northern side of the Mediterranean. But it seems more likely that the bulk of African humanity as represented by its modern types passed from Syria and Persia into Arabia, and thence into north-eastern Africa. Did the Neanderthal species of humanity—Homo primigenius, with his big head, big brain, short neck, long trunk and arms, and shambling legs, his ape-like jaws and possibly hairy body—ever populate any part of Africa? So far, no trace of him in an unmixed form has been found beyond the limits of Europe, either living or fossil. But no farther away from Africa than Gibraltar there has been obtained from the layers of deposit below the floor of a cave the famous neanderthaloid Gibraltar skull, Which in cranial capacity is lower than any other type of Homo primigenius as yet discovered. Yet there is nothing of the negro about this and other types of Homo primigenius. The nose was quite differently formed and was very large and prominent. The great brow ridges characteristic of Homo primigenius and of his collateral relation the modern Australoid are an un-negro-like feature, though occasionally they appear sporadically in the negroes of Equatorial Africa and even in the northern Bushmen. Some French anthropologists have thought that North Africa was first colonized by the Neanderthal species of man, and that this type has even left traces of its presence there in tribes like the Mogods of north-west Tunisia and certain peoples of the Atlas mountains. The successor and supplanter of Homo primigenius in western Europe was a generalized type of Homo sapiens, represented by the Galley-Hill man inhabiting south-east England, France, and central Europe some 150,000 years ago—to judge by the approximate age of the strata in which his earliest remains have been discovered. This man of the Thames estuary (Galley-Hill is in north Kent, near Dartford) resembled somewhat closely in skull-form and skeleton the Tasmanian aborigines and like them possessed considerable negroid affinities. There is some slight evidence that the Galley-Hill type co-existed for ages with the more specialized and divergent Homo primigenius(perhaps mingling his blood and producing hybrid types), but gradually supplanted this big-brained though brutish being and spread over Africa and southern Asia, penetrating finally to remote Tasmania, where his last direct descendants were exterminated in the middle of the 19th century by the British settlers in that genial island. Certain “Strandlooper” skulls of unknown age found in southernmost Africa seem to suggest affinities with the Tasmanian or Galley-Hill type who may have been the first real man to colonize Africa.
