The excerpt connects some southern African Later Stone Age hunting-gathering populations with the San, also called Bushmen, and the Khoi, also called Hottentots. Their identification is presented within a wider discussion of populations that continued using broadly similar stone equipment into recent times. The passage also places them alongside small negroid, pygmoid, and Khoisan populations in Central and eastern Africa.

Rock painting and perhaps engraving formed part of the cultural record associated with these populations and their predecessors. The origins of southern Africa’s famous rock art are said to lie firmly in the Later Stone Age, with the oldest examples dated to about 28,000 years ago, although much surviving art may be considerably later. The imagery is treated as potentially informative about the characteristics of earlier hunter-gatherers because of the conservatism attributed to such societies.

In the interior plateau, ethnography, excavated sites, and rock art suggest residential bands of roughly eight to twelve people or larger bands of twenty to twenty-five. Temporary gatherings of sixty or more individuals could assemble for communal hunting, trading, ceremonial dancing, and other special purposes, especially during the rainy season. This pattern combines small-scale residential organization with periodic wider social aggregation.