SOS Bushmen

IN the caves of South Africa's Cederberg mountains, an ancient people left a legacy of rock art that could teach modern man a valuable lesson or two about living in harmony with nature.

That is the view of John Parkington, professor of archaeology at the University of Cape Town, who has spent 40 years in the Cederberg and neighbouring areas researching rock paintings and other artefacts left by the pre-colonial hunter-gatherers who once roamed southern Africa.

The Bushmen, or San, left tens of thousands of paintings in ochre and clay, most depicting humans or three or four key animal species, and some showing men with the heads of animals.

Parkington launched the Living Landscape Project in the Cederberg town of Clanwilliam, about 250km north of Cape Town, five years ago to increase understanding of the region's archaeological assets and use them to attract tourists.

Parkington believes the pictures - some painted as recently as 200 years ago, others up to 10,000 years old - reflect the way the hunter-gatherers saw nature and their place in it, and include elements of shamanism.

With the domestication of plants and animals, humans started "moving ourselves out of the ecosystem ... that was the beginning of the process that took us to the position of being outsiders", he said.

"That's why we unbelievably and inexplicably are failing to recognise the threat of global warming, because we're outside it," he said. "We're going to carry on manipulating it until it's too late."

Parkington says the hunter-gatherers placed themselves inside the ecosystem.

"So they see animals as other beings who know the world in a different way."

The animal that occurs most often in Cederberg rock paintings is the eland, a large antelope that Parkington said was revered by the Bushmen as "a beautiful sentient being".