A Fossil Skull of an Ancestral Bushman from the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan

Abstract

It is now recognized that during the Pleistocene, or even duringa later prehistoric period, there were in northern Africa human races related to the existing Bushmen and the Hottentots of the south. The shape of the skull in some of the early Egyptians, indeed, suggests relationship to the Bushmen. The discovery in the Anglo- Egyptian Sudan of a new type of fossil human skull with several resemblances to that of a Bushman, is therefore of great interest. The specimen was found in February 1924 by Mr W. R. G. Bond, who was then Governor of the Fung Province of the Anglo-Egyptia Sudan. It was embedded in a limestone concretion, which lay a few feet above low-stage river level on the foreshore of the Blue Nile at Singa about 200 miles south of Khartoum. I have to thank Mr G. W. Grabham, then Government Geologist, for the opportunity of studying the fossil.