Primitive man as he existed in the Stone Age had very little in common with the “primitive men” of today. There are savages today who represent, in a way, a degree of savagery and a remoteness from civilization that in some respects takes them farther down the social ladder than any of the Aryan race of the Stone Age. “No pure primitive race exists in any part of the world today.”[16] Contact with more advanced races has invariably produced, sometimes a good and sometimes an evil effect. Races are what climate, soil, diet, pursuits, and inherited character make them,[17] and the Aryan savages of the Stone Age had a different set of these conditions to face from the Negro savages of today.
A WELL-CARED FOR ESKIMO INFANT
(COURTESY OF MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, NEW YORK)
NATIVE EAST AFRICAN MOTHER AND INFANT
(COURTESY OF THE MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, NEW YORK)
It is not surprising to find today a race that in many respects represents the Stone Age period of civilization, displaying, together with the most barbarous customs, a wide knowledge of the arts, indicating that there had been contact with some higher race or its representatives.
Tribes grade into one another in the matter of culture so that it is hard to classify them.[18] A struggle for existence may leave its mark on an advanced tribe so that while it may in general retain prominent barbaric or primitive characteristics, it will, in every other regard but these, seem an advanced tribe. The Nigritans, for instance,[19] have learned from their neighbours, the Abyssinians and the Arabs, the use of iron; yet they have not arrived at the Stone and Bronze ages in culture, and show in their social relations and domestic habits none of the characteristics of the more advanced tribes.
So in the treatment of children. Wherever the treatment of the child is at variance with the other customs or conditions of the race, it will almost invariably be discovered that the change is due to economic reasons or to contact with a stronger race. That it is this contact with higher races that has helped undeveloped races to advance, is the opinion of Sir H. H. Johnson.[20]
“In some respects I think the tendency of the Negro for several centuries past has been an actual retrograde one. As we come to read the unwritten history of Africa by researches into languages, manners, customs, traditions, we seem to see a backward rather than a forward movement going on for some thousand years past—a return towards the savage and even the brute. I can believe it possible that, had Africa been more isolated from contact with the rest of the world, and cut off from the immigration of the Arab and the European, the purely Negroid races, left to themselves, so far from advancing towards a higher type of humanity, might have actually reverted by degrees to a type no longer human.”
On the other hand, G. Stanley Hall says that our intercourse with the African races “had been a curse and not a blessing. Our own Indians are men of the Stone Age whom Bishop Whipple thought originally the noblest men on earth. Look at them now!”[21]