The main portion therefore of the inhabitants of the forest zone are agriculturists, save only the nomad Pygmies, who live in the inmost recesses of the forest and support themselves by hunting the game with which it abounds.
There were crude medieval notions that fossils were " freaks " or " sports " of nature (lusus naturae), or that they represented failures of a creative force within the earth (a notion of Greek and Arabic origin), or that larger and smaller fossils represented the remains of races of giants or of pygmies (the mythical idea).
These small individuals present apparently no other differences, and Sergi maintains that the difference is racial, these being the descendants of a race of pygmies who had emigrated from central Africa.
He may have read Joshua Barnes's description of a race of "Pygmies" in his Gerania of 1675.
Pygmy present populations go back to Nilotic and Bantu migrations as well as the indigenous pygmies.