Bastian’s “Psychic Unity”
Those who argue for independent invention rest their case largely on a distortion of the theory of “psychic unity” put forward by Adolf Bastian in mid-Victorian days. From studies of African and Asiatic cultures, Bastian developed the thesis that “psychic unity” everywhere produced similar “elementary ideas.” Thus early man in France and early man in Asia might harden the point of a wooden spear in a fire, or knock chips off a lump of flint to make a sharper tool, or make a rope out of twisted vines. But beyond “elementary ideas,” said Bastian, man would develop different things in different places, depending on different physical conditions; and finally, as he reached a higher plane of mental and social development, his ideas and his behavior would be influenced by other men and other cultures with which he came in contact. This was a sound thesis. Unfortunately, however, Bastian’s followers ignored the words “elementary ideas,” as well as the last half of his theory, and made “psychic unity” the provider of all good things from pots to pyramids.
There have been opponents of independent invention, of course. There were some in Bastian’s day. They pointed out—as Robert H. Lowie has done recently—that the champion of the theory must prove that different peoples making similar things were subjected to similar stimulants in both areas. Otherwise “all the societies of the world should share the features in question.”[2] Lowie might have said that all cultures of man should be alike today.
By and large, the diffusionists were in the minority. The distorters of Bastian triumphed. They triumphed even in the Old World, where distances were not always very great, and where traffic between Africa and Eurasia seemed not so very difficult. You can imagine, therefore, what a happy hunting ground the independent inventionists have made of the Americas. The New World is remote indeed from the Old. You must go back to the time of the glaciers to find a land-bridge and up to the Arctic to bring the two worlds within hailing distance of each other. Otherwise you must be willing to accept thousands of miles of ocean voyaging. The physical fact of the remoteness of the Americas has stopped many a mental adventurer among the anthropologists. He rereads with respect—perhaps too much respect—these words of Spinden’s: “The fact that no food plant is common to the two hemispheres is enough to offset any number of petty puzzles in arts and myths.”[3]
If the physical fact of the Pacific Ocean had not been enough to stifle talk of diffusion, the extravagant theories of Sir Grafton Elliot Smith would have done the job. Here was a diffusionist indeed! Echoed by W. J. Perry, Smith found the beginnings of all culture of any importance in Egypt, and from there he sent its traveling salesmen abroad to sell it to Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Pearls and pyramids, gold and dolmens, initiations and totemism, sun worship and the marriage of brother and sister, mummies—even if they were no more than desiccated bodies wrapped in a bag—these traits and many more all “proved” that the Children of the Sun had sold their cultural goods to lesser peoples.
There were other theorists as wild and whirling. Augustus Le Plongeon brought the Maya from Atlantis to found Egypt. Ignatius Donnelly reversed the procession and dragged Greeks to Atlantis and then Mexico. Lewis Spence transported Atlas across the Atlantic as the Mexican god Quetzalcoatl. Leo Wiener, as Spinden has put it, “derives everything of importance in the New World from the highly civilized coasts of Gambia and Sierra Leone ... brightest Africa.”[4] And then there was Churchward with his continent of Mu.
Smiths and Perry’s uncritical use of evidence and their distortion of fact—plus these fantasies of Africa and Atlantis and Mu—put the friends of independent invention even more firmly in the saddle than the single and simple fact of the Pacific Ocean. The diffusion of Smith et al. was a diffusion to end all diffusion.
Americanists—students of man in the New World—have not yet escaped from the curse of the Children of the Sun, and the terror of Atlantis and Mu. One of the best, Baron Erland Nordenskiöld, a distinguished Swedish scientist, gave a great deal of energy to the cataloguing of the many evidences of analogies; and yet he came to the conclusion that, by and large, Indian culture was a product of independent invention in the New World.[5] He granted that the Indians may have received from Oceania through random voyages “one or two cultivable plants and possibly a few more culture elements”—knowledge of how to make crude clay vessels, for example.[6] Hrdlička, too, conceded a small number of sea-borne visitors before Columbus: “It is ... probable that the western coast of America, within the last 2,000 years, was on more than one occasion reached by small parties of Polynesians, and that the eastern coast was similarly reached by small groups of whites, and that such parties may have locally influenced the culture of the Americans.”[7] But Hrdlička considered such voyaging of very little importance.
CIRCUMPACIFIC NAVIGATION?
There are marked resemblances between the traits of the Maori of New Zealand and of the Indians of the northwest coast of North America. Among these are sailing ships and houses. (After figures on a map by Covarrubias, 1940.)
NEW ZEALAND NORTHWESTERN AMERICA
Only two anthropologists of any standing have favored diffusion. The first of these, Earnest A. Hooton, rejected “the supposition that these various Asiatic invaders brought with them to the New World nothing but a repressed desire to indulge in independent invention, that they came with culturally empty hands, but brains stuffed full of patents to be filed only after arrival.... I have no use at all for the anthropological isolationists who are determined to maintain the incredible dogma that there was no diffusion of inventions and ideas from the Old World to the New, but only of naked human animals.”[8]