George William Stow (2 February 1822, Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England – 17 March 1882, Heilbron, Orange Free State) was a geologist and ethnologist, a poet, historian, artist, cartographer, and writer.

In turn he taught at a mission near Cuylerville, was a clerk in the commissariat, tried his hand at farming, became a book-keeper in Port Elizabeth, a trader in Queenstown and a wine-merchant, diamond dealer and auctioneer in Kimberley.

However, geology was his first love and when he heard in 1872 that the Cape Colony Governor, Sir Henry Barkly, needed a geographical report on Griqualand West, he immediately put forward his name.

[2] In a letter dated June 1877 to Dorothea Bleek's aunt, Lucy Lloyd, Stow confided his plan to continue documenting rock art with the help of his young Bushman assistant.

Throughout his trips over South Africa, Stow recorded information on tribes with which he came in contact, leading him to believe that the San or Bushmen were the ancient inhabitants of the region and the Bantu peoples relative newcomers.

He also wrote manuscripts on individual tribes, and these were later discovered at Smithfield by his biographer, Prof. Robert Burns Young, Head of the Geology Department at Witwatersrand University and a colleague of Raymond Dart.