Quaggas, Equus quagga quagga, were plains zebras in southern Africathat ranged from east of Cape Town to the Orange Free State. They had fewer stripes on their bodies and a browner coloration than other zebras; their legs and bellies lacked stripes. The indigenous Khoe-San hunted quaggas and incorporated them into their art and folklore. Settlers used quaggas to pull wagons and kept them with livestock as protection against predators. In Europe, quaggas were admired, exhibited, and used to pull carriages. One quagga mated with a horse attracted commentary from Charles Darwin as the experiment seemed to confirm a theory of inheritance. Excessive hunting in their native habitats and the absence of captive breeding led to quaggas’ extinction in the late nineteenth century. Since 1987, the Quagga Project in South Africa has been selectively breeding plains zebras to produce animals with quagga coat coloration; however, could the funds expended have been better spent on conservation of endangered organisms and their habitats? Cape mountain zebras and bonteboks narrowly escaped extinction; how they were saved is discussed, along with other examples of conservation in South Africa.

This chapter describes adaptive advances in cultural artefacts in the form of stone or bone tools and rock art and relates them to genetic linkages among local populations. The earliest Odowan cores and flakes gave way to bifacial Acheulian points and cleavers and later to finely crafted artefacts inaugurating the Middle Stone Age, associated with the emergence of modern humans. During the late Pleistocene further cultural advances were exhibited by inhabitants of coastal caves in the south-western Cape when the interior was largely uninhabited. The use of spear and arrow points fostered the movement out of Africa and may have contributed to extinctions among large grazers. Genomic evidence reinforces movements by language groups spreading herding and farming through Africa. Khoe-San and Hadza people retained the hunter-gatherer lifestyle into modern times. Rock art depicts the ritual significance of large mammals in their culture. African people lived alongside abundant wild herbivores until Europeans brought guns.