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Grafton Elliot Smith
Published by Good Press, 2021
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The explanation is to be found, I believe, in a curious psychological process incidental to the intensive study of an intricate problem. As knowledge increased and various scholars attempted to define the means by (and the time at) which the contacts of various peoples took place, difficulties were revealed which, though really trivial, were magnified into insuperable obstacles. All of these real difficulties were created by mistaken ideas of the relative chronology of the appearance of civilisation in various centres, and especially by the failure to realise that useful arts were often lost. For example, if on a certain mainland A two practices, a and b—one of them, a, a useful practice, say the making of pottery; the other, b, a useless custom, say the preservation of the corpse—were developed, and a was at least as old, or preferably definitely older than b, it seemed altogether inconceivable to the ethnologist if an island B was influenced by the culture of the mainland A, at some time after the practices a and b were in vogue, that it might, under any conceivable circumstances, fail to preserve the useful art a, even though it might allow the utterly useless practice b to lapse. Therefore it was argued that, if the later inhabitants of B mummified their dead, but did not make pottery, this was clear evidence that they could not have come under the influence of A.
But the whole of the formidable series of obstacles raised by this kind of argument has been entirely swept away by Dr. Rivers, who has demonstrated how often it has happened that a population has completely lost some useful art which it once had, and even more often clung to some useless practice (65).
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