The discovery of these forest Pygmies has directed attention to the Bushmen of South Africa, a desert-dwelling race, long known though comparatively little regarded in their ethnological significance. They are now by many regarded as an outlying branch of the forest Pygmies, the chief difference being in the shape of the skull, which is rather long in the Bushmen, rather short in the Pygmies. These degraded wanderers inhabit an area extending from the inner ranges of the mountains of Cape Colony, through the central Kalahari desert, to near Lake Ngami, and thence northwestward to the Ovambo River. Into these, the most barren portions of the South African deserts, they have been driven by the encroachments of Kaffirs, Hottentots, and Europeans.
They closely resemble the Akka tribes of the north, averaging about four and a half feet in height, and possessing deep-set, crafty eyes, small and depressed nose, and a generally repulsive countenance. Their complexion is of a dirty yellow. Their hair grows in small, woolly tufts. In the vicinity of Lake Ngami, Livingstone found them to be of larger stature and darker color, while Baines measured some in this region who were five feet six inches in height. In disposition the Bushmen are strikingly wild, malicious, and intractable, while their cerebral development is classed by Humboldt as belonging to almost the lowest class of the human species.
Close in affinity with the Bushmen, and in various respects unlike the dark races around them, are the Hottentots, the original inhabitants of Cape Colony, a race of herdsmen who are much superior in culture to the degraded desert nomads. They are not dwarfish, being of medium stature, but they resemble the Bushmen in complexion, in which and in general cast of features they present some similarity to the Chinese. Their hair, like that of the Bushmen, grows in tufts, with spaces between, and they are like them in language, their method of speech consisting largely in a series of clicking sounds. Their manner of talking has been compared to the clucking of a hen, and by the Dutch to the "gobbling of a turkeycock." The Hottentots present every appearance of being a developed branch of the Pygmy family, or the result of a cross between Bushmen and negroes.