1. A number of authoritative scholars seriously question the propriety of interpreting prehistoric remains by reference to the customs of modern primitive peoples. 2. After all, these were the most primitive people of all, our earliest ancestors. 3. All the islands, including even Java, harbour primitive peoples, often still living in stone-age conditions. 4. I know of no primitive people anywhere that either rejects and despises conflict or represents warfare as an absolute evil. 5. It seems that primitive peoples ate human flesh for broadly two reasons. 6. Like all primitive peoples they believed in spirits with influence over human life. 7. The old anthropological concept dreamed up in the universities to describe the potentialities of nature as understood by primitive people. 8. The West, by contrast, assimilated its own primitive peoples very early on. 9. This would not seem strange to primitive people at all. 10. Driven by a built-in number sense, the theory goes, primitive people explored the wonders of counting by playing with their fingers or putting rocks in a pile. |