WAS PRIMITIVE MAN A MODERN SAVAGE? 



By Talcott Williams. 



The early primitive, primeval past has three witnesses — its early tra- 

 dition, conscious and unconscious; archaeological research into its 

 remains, and the anthropological study of existing savage and barba- 

 rian races. These three sources sum our knowledge of the beginnings 

 of things. It is the current tendency to challenge the value of tradi- 

 tion, to exalt the value of inferences drawn from anthropology, and to 

 interpret all archaeological discovery in the light of our knowledge of 

 the savage of to-day. His study has played the same part in deter- 

 mining our view of the dawn of history as has the study of the lower 

 organisms in determining our conception of the origin and development 

 of the human species. Both have been accepted as repeating in their 

 present activity the unknown past. From both have been drawn the 

 inferences on which rest current theories as to the beginnings of his- 

 tory and the descent of man. 



The value of both methods of study is not altered because it is neces- 

 sary from time to time, with new knowledge, to readjust our past 

 application of recorded facts to an unrecorded past. This perpetual 

 readjustment between our knowledge of facts and our application of 

 them is the measure of the progress of science. In all fields it inex- 

 orably proceeds; in all it marks not reaction but growth. If, in biol- 

 ogy, the recapitulation theory is less implicitly accepted than it once 

 was, as spelling all the riddle of fetal changes, it is not because less is 

 known of embryology, but more. If new controversies as to the plas- 

 ticity of the early cell and as to the capacity of all cells either to acquire 

 or transmit hereditary or acquired influences postpone the solution of 

 some of the issues of life whose discovery seemed near twenty-five 

 years ago, it is not because the true solution is more distant than it 

 once was, but because it is nearer. The readjustment which has been 

 necessary m biology in employing the lowest organisms to explain the 

 origin of human life is equally necessary and equally probable in the 

 attempts to explain the origin of human society by the use of the low- 

 est forms of organized society. These attempts have left on us all the 

 impression and image of the progress of man as beginning with a sav- 

 age — bestial, degraded, and repulsive, lower than the lowest now 



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