Vanishing primitive man.., p.1
Vanishing Primitive Man (Search Book 9), page 1
VANISHING PRIMITIVE MAN
Timothy Severin
© Timothy Severin 1973
Timothy Severin has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1973 by American Heritage Publishing Co., Inc.
This edition published in 2019 by Lume Books.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Genesis: An Introduction
A Living Stone Age
Children of the Forest
The Cunas of Golden Castile
Aristocrats of the Ocean
The “Click” People
Technocrats of the North
The Sky People of Hokkaido
Cannibals and Missionaries
The Ski Runners of Lapland
The Spartans of the Mato Grosso
Exodus, Judges, and Lamentations
Recommended Reading
Acknowledgments
Foreword
by Colin M. Turnbull
One of the greatest sources of mankind’s success in the game of survival has been our ability, and willingness, to ask questions. For us, as opposed to felines, it would be the lack of curiosity that would prove lethal. But it is equally true that curiosity, if too limited or selective, or if inadequately fulfilled, can lead to an even greater and more dangerous ignorance in which we mistake a superficial acquaintance with limited facts for knowledge, equating mere observation with wisdom. It is eminently right that man should be curious, and be especially curious about man, but it is essential that this vital curiosity should be satisfied not only with facts, but with understanding; and that, I believe, is what anthropology tries to do.
With the world opening up around us it is important that all of us, not just a few, should have the ability to look at other peoples, other ways of life and thought, with such understanding. Newspaper reports and even television documentaries are all too fleeting. Although they illuminate new horizons, they are most often compiled by people who may be on the spot but who are unable to spend the time necessary for a profound study. That, after all, is not their job. The result is that the reports and documentaries and our own consequent opinions are framed in terms of our own experience, our own values. True understanding then becomes impossible, and the door is opened to that comfortable sense of superiority that can lead, all too subtly, to bigotry.
Anthropology, by its very nature, makes no initial judgments. It observes what people do but also asks itself why they do it. Frequently, in this way, we come to realize that however odd something that other people do may seem to be, in effect it may be directed toward a goal that is not odd at all. It is, surprisingly, often embarrassing to find that despite the apparent oddity of his customs, “primitive” man may not only share many goals with “civilized” man, but seems able to achieve them more readily and surely. We begin to question just what we mean by such terms as “primitive” and “civilized.” Above all, anthropology and the anthropological approach tell us to look below and beyond the superficial exotica, the mere descriptive facts, and learn something about the process, about what is really going on, avoiding the pitfalls of those initial, hasty judgments. That strange and often disturbing world beyond our own familiar realm of experience then becomes far less strange and disturbing. To read about another people becomes one of the most exciting intellectual adventures, carrying us far beyond the empty half-truths of glossy photograph magazines. And the most exciting thing of all is when, instead of seeing some exotic native resplendent in robes of feathers and cowrie shells, or stark staring naked, we begin to recognize a dim reflection of ourselves.
This I believe to be the true significance of anthropology, that it informs us about ourselves more than about others. It does this in terms of our biology, our history and evolution, our social and cultural forms. Social anthropology in particular, dealing with the many ways in which men band together in societies, voluntarily cooperating in the joint effort toward survival, has its origins firmly rooted in those moral philosophers who, like Montesquieu in France and Hume in Scotland, were primarily concerned with their own societies and with the dangers so evidently facing them. It was in the effort to establish a technique for better understanding one’s own society that social anthropology had its first beginnings, yet we have grown sadly away from that very legitimate goal and have become more engrossed with the technique itself. Indeed the technique and the body of theory have become goals in themselves, and the people we live among while conducting our field research are sometimes treated as though they were mere experimental guinea pigs.
This is not to say that there is not still plenty of room for more morally oriented field research, and for the further sharpening of our tools and elaboration of our body of theory, but there is both room and need for anthropology also to return to a consideration of our own society. We do not have all the answers, by any means, nor are we yet in a position to manipulate our social structure to achieve any desired goal. But we have arrived at a general understanding of the social process in small-scale societies (a better term than “primitive”), and this is of profound significance for our understanding of our own society. Just as we learn not to be dismayed or elated by what we see on the surface in exotic society, so should we not be too readily delighted or disgusted by what we see in our own. In the field situation we ask ourselves what is being achieved by a given custom for society as a whole; and by the application of the same technique to our own society and its frequently bizarre customs we should be less ready to rush into judgments that really are founded only on the superficial appearance of what things seem to be.
There is no doubt that the vast majority of anthropologists, whatever branch of the discipline they pursue, would agree that despite man’s immense and glorious superficial diversity, the basic unity of man is even more striking. Anthropological findings have been and probably will be used, for some time to come, by a few to support self-centered theories of racial, social, or intellectual supremacy, just as earlier findings were used to support and justify colonial rule, even to show colonial powers how to rule more “effectively.” But this is plainly the fault of current philosophical attitudes, not of anthropology itself. The main controversy today is perhaps whether or not anthropology should concern itself with contemporary Western society, or whether it should retreat still further into its intellectual ivory tower, abnegating all social responsibility in the name of “pure science.”
Be that as it may, this book, perhaps just because it is not written by an anthropologist, makes free use of the findings of anthropologists for the very real benefit of the public, and of society at large. The cold scientific facts are presented by the author, tempered and brought to life by his personal reflections, in an attempt to stimulate the reader to interpret the facts for himself, in terms of his own experience.
Reading some of the accounts, even the one drawn from my own field work, I found myself led forward not as an anthropologist but as a person whose experience of the world, however wide, was still infinitesimal. In reading about my own material, for instance, I saw things I had not seen before because the author uses the facts differently and asks different questions. Even more, when reading about areas I have never visited, I experienced that old excitement that still makes me feel slightly sick and weak at the knees every time I go into the field. I wonder how on earth I will make the first contact; what the language will be like; whether we will have any language in common or whether I will have to be treated like a baby all over again — taught to talk, what and how to eat, where to go, and what to do and not do. The exotic context still appeals to me as much as ever, but not just for itself, not by any means. It appeals to me because by now I know, beyond any doubt, that however strange a people may seem, however much I may even detest what they do, I will find, in them, a new part of myself that I have never known before. Any reader who reads with his eyes open, asking himself why people do this or that, trying to see what it is they are achieving for their society as a whole, can share this sensation of self-discovery.
But apart from learning about ourselves as individuals, we should also learn a great deal about our own society, its goals and its values, and the direction in which it is going. The parallels are by no means exact, and even the comparisons are not simple to make, and the result is sometimes discouraging because we seem to have advanced so little, except in terms of technology. Some of the accounts given in this book illustrate the damage that can be done to humanity from the unthinking application of other standards and values, presumed to be superior simply because they are our own. Even in our own society the gap between the preaching and the practice seems to be almost irreconcilable. That, however, far from discouraging us, should move us to ask pertinent questions about our chosen life style and the direction in which it is leading us. Here, perhaps more than anywhere, each reader will have to make up his own mind for himself.
Even scientists get their facts wrong sometimes, and scientists are notable for their interminable controversies over interpretation of data. One of their perpetual problems, of course, is that one can never be quite sure what is going to be discovered tomorrow that might upset all the interpretations of today. In some areas the danger is greater than in others. In anthropology, for instance, a single new skeletal find could easily upset all the current beliefs about man’s origins, though the likelihood grows less and less . Historical and social data are less ambiguous, though different scholars working in exactly the same field at exactly the same time will almost certainly see different things. This I know from personal experience. It does not mean that one is right and the other is wrong; it means that any single observer, necessarily, is partial, and selective. Such a caution would be as true of any scientific monograph as it would be of this book, and this book has the advantage, for the general public, of being infinitely more readable than most monographs.
Read with this awareness, in recognition of the fact that the word “primitive” (which some would prefer to avoid) is not used in any derogatory way, the accounts given here should lead any reader well down that life-giving path of self-discovery where he will find that “primitive man” is not so unlike ourselves at all, and has as much to teach us about our own present and future as about the past.
Genesis:
An Introduction
It was a butterfly hunter who discovered Olduvai Gorge. In 1911 a German entomologist with the resounding name of Professor Kattwinkel was hot in pursuit of a butterfly in the scrub-covered countryside of what is now Tanzania in East Africa, when he was led to the lip of an uncharted chasm. Before him opened a sharp gash in the earth’s surface, an ancient river canyon some three hundred feet deep and about twenty-five miles long, whose eroded walls exposed layer upon layer of the rock strata. Even to the untutored eye of the butterfly hunter it was obvious that the site was immensely rich in fossils. Climbing down into the gorge, Kattwinkel picked up some of the bones and took them back to Germany, where they caused a sensation when they were found to be the relics of several long-extinct animals. A German expedition promptly set out to explore the new discovery, but its work was cut short by the outbreak of World War I. Not until 1931 did the first major expedition of trained archeologists finally examine Olduvai in detail. Its members realized at once that they stood in possibly the world’s richest known fossil site — the ancient stamping ground, for generation upon generation, of an extraordinary menagerie of prehistoric fauna, and as it turned out, one of the homes of an apelike creature who could have been ancestral to man.
In some respects Olduvai is an archeologist’s dream site. The rock strata so conveniently exposed along the sides of the canyon offer a steady and remarkably comprehensive progression of local geological history. Handily too, the time span of this geology begins almost exactly with the early Pleistocene epoch, about 1.9 million years ago, and continues right through the crucial periods of the Ice Age, when so many vital changes took place in the animal life of the world. Olduvai is also something of a geological freak. Sandwiched between the layers of sedimentary rocks, mostly laid down by an ancient lake, are layers of lava flows. These lava bands can be dated with some accuracy by a potassium-argon technique; and so Olduvai has become one of the best dated archeological sites in existence, and most of its fossil bones can be placed very precisely in their correct time zones. It is as though Nature — having first marked her lines of dates by the rocks — then considerately left behind the fossil bones to show exactly what animals existed in the region during each period. Most important of all, however, is Olduvai’s brief glimpse into man’s early history. Scattered among the bones of more than 150 different species of animals are a few — pitifully few — human and near-human fragments, the remains of apelike or manlike creatures that once inhabited this region of East Africa, and that in the opinion of some experts evolved into modern man.
The oldest ape-man fossils found at Olduvai belong to a group usually known as the australopithecines. Strong contenders for the title of “the earliest men,” they make up a loose grouping of hominid (manlike) creatures whose remains have been found in South Africa as well as East Africa and also in Asia. Characterized by their upright posture, near-human teeth structure, and a brain size equal to or greater than that of the gorilla, the australopithecines hover somewhere on the borderline between apes and men as far as the anatomists are concerned. The picture is complicated by the fact that at least two types of australopithecines existed, and both types are represented at Olduvai. One was a well-built animal weighing some 140 pounds and standing about 5 feet tall. Because his teeth were fairly massive and well adapted for chewing, it appears that he was probably a vegetarian. The other form of australopithecine was smaller and more delicate, perhaps 12 inches shorter and about 80 pounds lighter. But his appearance was deceptive, for this smaller version was the more deadly. The broken scraps of small and weak animals near his occupation sites indicate that the smaller australopithecine was carnivorous, and it has been suggested by some authorities that he might even have caught and killed the babies and infirm dotards among his more robust cousins if he could get his hands on them.
The differences between the large and small australopithecines illustrate very well the sort of dilemmas that plague the paleoanthropologists as they try to establish just where and how mankind arose. When all is said and done, the fossil evidence of man’s ancestry is still embarrassingly scanty. It is often the result of chance discoveries like Kattwinkel’s, followed by painstaking years of toil on hands and knees with dental picks and camel’s-hair brushes to clear away the rubble and produce half a drawerful of bone fragments. In Olduvai, for example, nearly twenty-eight years of labor were required before the first human skull was found, and the wealthy sponsors who then arrived got seven thousand tons of rubble among the rewards for their first year’s cash grants. It is not surprising that challenged by this paucity of evidence and the enormous implications of any new discovery, few archeologists can agree on a precise scenario for the rise of man from ape to sapiens. For instance, with the two types of australopithecines, there is still no consensus of opinion on whether they were members of the same species or whether either type is a direct ancestor to man. All that can be said is that the lighter, smaller, and carnivorous australopithecine could have evolved into an intermediate form of the genus Homo, while the burly vegetarian strain apparently became extinct.
The truth of the matter — and its fascination — is that Charles Darwin in the mid-nineteenth century only set in motion the theory of human evolution. Since then its precise course has been remarkably erratic. In the days before Darwin there was a clear-cut and comforting simplicity to the notion that man had appeared full-fledged at a biblical Creation — on the morning of the 23rd of October, 4004 b.c., according to a tidy-minded church mathematician. But after Darwin it has become increasingly apparent that human evolution was considerably more complex and widespread than even the great evolutionist had supposed. Indeed, if Darwin shook the comfortable notions of the creationists, much the same sort of shock was registered in 1924 at a lower notch on the academic Richter scale when the first australopithecine was found by Raymond Dart, a young professor of anatomy in South Africa. Dart boldly announced that he had identified a member of “an extinct race of apes intermediate between living anthropoids and man.” His claim for what was in some respects a missing link was based on his examination of the fossilized skull of a juvenile apelike creature found in a South African limestone quarry at Taung. That skull and more recent discoveries at half a dozen other sites, particularly at Olduvai, established beyond doubt that man is far more ancient than had previously been supposed and has been on earth for more than two million years, instead of the five hundred thousand years or less of earlier estimates.
When the Taung find abruptly pushed the archeologists’ base line back by at least 1.5 million years, the scholarly reflex was simply to look at all the existing fossil material and reclassify it accordingly. Such famous relics as Peking man, excavated from the caves at Choukoutien in North China during the 1920’s and 1930’s, or the bones of Java man found at the end of the nineteenth century were reallocated to a new intermediate group collectively labeled Homo erectus. It seemed a reasonable hypothesis that these creatures of the Homo erectus type must have evolved out of the australopithecines during the 1.5-million-year gap between them. Unfortunately the last thirty years have seen even this neat theory fall into disrepute. Fresh discoveries of fossil ape-men have cast doubt on the idea of direct ancestral links between australopithecine and erectus, since several of the earliest erectus fossils are actually older than the later australopithecines, overlapping them somewhere about a million years ago.
