The art of the primitive African tribes was abundant - every article of everyday use was decorated with human, animal and geometric decoration. Their art is tightly interwoven with their existence - much more than the white man's art is in his.
In the last Ice Age, the north African coastal planes, now sandy desert, were green with roaming herds of animals and snow capped mountains. In Algeria, dolmens, menhirs and ritual stone circles remain as testimony to the vanished races. The drying of the Sahara desert and separation of Africa from Europe left only the Nile civilization to develop. In the real of Africa developed in separate isolated tribes. The light skinned bushmen of South Africa lived a stone age existence right up to the present time.
Only 4'6" in height, they lived as nomadic hunters and food gatherers. The dark skinned Africans of East Africa were hunters and herdsmen, living in tribal communities who had never formulated a religion, believing in supernatural spirits inhabiting the bush. Africans from the west coast had a simple agricultural society with beliefs based on ancestor worship. This gave a need of ancestral figures and idols mainly in wood and ivory, although the bronze castings from the Benin river are of unusual quality. For the most part, African art has a crude clumsy cubist nature which has recently been a strong influence in modern art.