Abstract
IN another column of this issue of NATUJRE (see p. 37) a summary is given of a short paper by Dr. T. F. Dreyer of Bloemfontein on “The Significance of the Bushman Skull”, of which the importance for the anthropologist, the sociologist and in the long run possibly also for the statesman, is by no means to be gauged by its brevity. It opens up a wide vista of farther research and inference on the all-important question of miscegenation. Students of the effects of racial contact and admixture, from lack of positive and unequivocal evidence, have long hesitated to endorse the popular verdict that crossbreeds in man have the vices of both parent races and the virtues of neither. They prefer, or rather are forced, to attribute the observed defects in character of such hybrids, and especially of hybrids between white and coloured, to the environmental influence of the social conditions to which as a rule they are confined, rather than to any inherent hereditary weakness. Some, perhaps, would go so far as to concede the possibility that extreme diversity in physical make-up of two widely separated races in the parents may react unfavourably in the offspring; but on the whole, notwithstanding the results of a number of investigations, judgment has more or less remained in suspense.
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Bushman Hybrids. Nature 139, 20 (1937). https://doi.org/10.1038/139020a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/139020a0
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