546 WAS PRIMITIVE MAN A MODERN SAVAGE? 



indicia which have been deemed the signs and survival of a savage 

 origin, but which in the secondary stage of these communities and in 

 the modern savage are the product of pressure, and not the normal 

 fruits of the primitive development of man. 



Much, inscrutable and inexplicable on the theory that all in ancient 

 and much in modern cultures is to be explained and read in the light 

 and lesson of the debased savage, becomes rational and luminous on 

 the theory just sketched, which allows for the absence in primitive 

 culture of the precise pressure under which the modern savage lives 

 and has lived for generations, and through which he has become what 

 he is. The golden age of peace, virtue, and justice, which appears in 

 every popular mythology, and which it is at once crude and unscientific 

 to dismiss as a myth, squares itself with the development just described. 

 The diffusion of primitive myths, primitive culture, and primitive com- 

 merce becomes easily explainable when we remember how freely among 

 such isolated communities the trader would pass. 



We know that he thus passed among American Indian tribes. The 

 native copper-gold alloy of Bogota has been found in pre-Columbian 

 ornaments in south Jersey. Native copper of Michigan was carried 

 all over the continent, and the conch shells of its sea coast penetrated 

 to its center. The turquoise of our southwest is found in ancient 

 graves a thousand miles away. In the old world, the diffusion of jade 

 in prehistoric times is a familiar and typical example of like phenomena. 

 Tin found at opposite extremities of Europe and of Asia spread over 

 all the space between, the terms of the two extremities meeting near 

 the Iranic plateau. Copper from the Biscayan mines, the mines of the 

 Atlas, and the carbonate of copper of the Taurus, spread over all west- 

 ern Asia and Europe. Such commerce would be impossible if the sav- 

 age were in perpetual tribal war, but, as a matter of fact, with our own 

 American Indians, the instant the zone of pressure caused by infringing 

 civilization is passed, there is found the utmost freedom for the trader 

 who moved with relative and remarkable security between tribes at 

 war and with complete safety between tribes at peace. Nor can any 

 one who has been fortunate enough to break the bounds of civiliza- 

 tion and leave behind him its frontier of hate fail to be struck with 

 a new attitude toward the stronger and a hospitality which literature, 

 wiser than anthropology, has justly termed a primitive virtue. 



So with the diffusion of myth and custom. To our thoughts, full of 

 the wars of history, and our imagination, affected by the specter of strife 

 as the normal condition of the savage, isolation seems the characteristic 

 of primitive culture. Communication was, however, probably freer than 

 at a later period, when conflicting frontiers had turned hospes into 

 hostis. Once diffused, however, the new frontiers which divided what 

 had once been an elastic and easily penetrated zone prevented further 

 intercommunication, and this may, perhaps, explain so much which is 

 insular in the "fauna" of religions, but an insularity which at so many 

 points hints an early continental communication. 



