Apart from Poole quay on a Friday and Saturday night, where would you find the most primitive people… those most unaffected by the modern world?
What has kept them as the nearest thing to the living Stone Age… isolation maybe…
With all the speculation about how and why Stonehenge was built etc, and a multitude of other ancient secrets… can’t we learn something from them? To look at a problem through their eyes would be most enlightening.

Where? The rainforests of Brazil and the mountains and forests of Papua/New Guinea, areas that are fairly inaccessable due to terrain and still isolated as a result.

I'm sure there is much to learn from people still following their traditional ways, but we in the so called 'civilised' world tend to be arrogant about things like that. If the number of times terms like 'first and third worlds', or 'stone age' and 'dark ages' are bandied about (as examples of an undesirable state of existance) are any indication anway.

Look at Australia as an example, only 200yrs ago it had a perfect example of a stone age population and did it or does it attempt to learn anything from it's indigenous inhabitants? The opposite in fact, it has always and still does exert extreme pressure on Aboriginal communities to follow and live a European existance, almost to the exclusion of any other.

Cultural Anthropology is the discipline which does - amongst other things - just what you describe, Norm.

There is a tendency these days to avoid using terms such as "primitive" to describe contemporary cultures which have established and retained social cohesion without ever having developed an apparent need for a complex material interaction with their environment, and in fact study of their adaptation to their relative environments is often used to illuminate and advance our understanding of human adaptational patterns generally, including those pertaining to more complex societies. Exactly what you wondered about, in other words.

Archaeological Anthropology has also played a part in bringing about this more informed appreciation of diversity without prejudicial assessments of "primitivism" clouding the issue. Over the years the accumulation of material evidence for the development of these cultures has helped dispel the notion that they have been somehow "stuck" in developmental stasis since the Stone Age (or indeed any other point in time in the past). As we now understand much more about climate change patterns over the millennia, for example, we can find evidential data supporting the theory that in many cases these cultures, just like everyone else on the planet, were often forced to adapt in order to survive, a point which of course should really have been self-evident from the start given that they have survived to be studied at all.

Interestingly, both archaeology and anthropology started out as scientific endeavours to understand contemporary society, and it was a while before a true understanding of the chronology and genuine antiquity of human development began to become evident through the findings this research produced. We tend nowadays to think of both as being obsessed primarily with the past, but in many ways Cultural Anthropology's renewed emphasis on applying its findings to understanding contemporary human societies is actually it being true to its genuine origins as a science.

How do you get to study these communities with their cooperation? Like ID my first thought was Papua New Guinea and the Amazon rainforests were places where there are some communities who have not have much, if any, contact with the outside world, and I don't feel that Papua New Guinean tribal members would be entirely welcoming. (Having said that, there is a man in our community - not academic, not religious, not wealthy - who spends about half his life there, having been befriended by a local family in a very isolated area, and working with and for them.

Last year I read of an Italian family who suffered from fatal familialinsomnia and they were very reluctant to allow any sort of medical intervention and study, feeling they were freakish and not wanting to be analysed. It has taken many years for them to feel comfortable about being studied with a view to being helped. Not that seems to be anything that can actually be done to help them.

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How do you get to study these communities with their cooperation?

You ask them, I suppose.

It is generally understood that isolated societies composed primarily of phratries are more amenable to active cooperation. Those composed primarily of moieties are more resistant. There have been many occasions of debate concerning the behaviour of certain anthropologists with regard to moietical cultures - the consensus now is that the most ethical approach is no approach at all.

It is also misleading to assume that all such cultures can automatically be assumed to have the level of material interaction with their environment that they do primarily because they have been historically isolated from others. The two circumstances can overlap but need not, as studies of indigenous cultures in South America have often shown.

I certainly agree with no approach at all… a great pity it’s a more modern reasoning. I read that no matter how primitive a people were the missionaries of old began with ramming religion down their throats and getting them clothed… to hide their ‘sin’…
Hypothetically what would kick start a culture making inroads into the modern world? I note the nomads wandering the central regions of Africa herding goats etc. all seem to sport fancy watches for example…

The reasoning is not that modern. The concept of the ‘noble savage’ is discernible in the works of the Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus particularly with regard to the German tribes in De Origine et situ Germanorum written during the reign of the emperor Vespasian when the Roman empire was at its height. And writing over 130 years later, Lucius Cassius Dio says in his Ῥωμαϊκὴ Ἱστορία (Historia Romana) that:

'Caratacus, a barbarian chieftain who was captured and brought to Rome and later pardoned by Claudius, wandered about the city after his liberation; and after beholding its splendour and its magnitude he exclaimed: "And can you, then, who have got such possessions and so many of them, covet our poor tents?"'

What’s noteworthy about that translation is that Dio’s Roman History (written in Greek) was only first known to have been translated into Latin in the 16th Century. It was then translated into French and English etc in the 17th century. That first Greek-to-Latin translation, however, was from an abridged version of Dio’s work compiled in the 11th Century by the Byzantine monk Ioannus Zifilinos (John Xiphilin) which doesn’t mention Caratacus by name and only relates in passing that Claudius and Vespasian had invaded Britain but gives few details. It was not until the late 19th Century that the American classicist Herbert Baldwin Foster returned to the Dio’s original texts and attempted a comprehensive translation into English which was published in 1905.

Needless to say that Caratacus’ words were paraphrased by various subject people of the British, French and American empires etc in the 19th and 20th centuries. And at the same time as Foster was translating Dio in the late 19th Century, in the South Pacific, the writer Robert Louis Stevenson was commenting on the fate of the people of Samoa. In A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (1892) he wrote:

'They are Christians, church-goers, singers of hymns at family worship, hardy cricketers; their books are printed in London by Spottiswoode, Trubner, or the Tract Society; but in most other points they are the contemporaries of our tattooed ancestors who drove their chariots on the wrong side of the Roman wall.'

He also acknowledged the widely held view at the time that such people might have been better off had they been left alone:

'The huge majority of Samoans, like other God-fearing folk in other countries, are perfectly content with their own manners. And upon one condition, it is plain they might enjoy themselves far beyond the average of man. Seated in islands very rich in food, the idleness of the many idle would scarce matter; and the provinces might continue to bestow their names among rival pretenders, and fall into war and enjoy that a while, and drop into peace and enjoy that, in a manner highly to be envied. But the condition — that they should be let alone — is now no longer possible. More than a hundred years ago, and following closely on the heels of Cook, an irregular invasion of adventurers began to swarm about the isles of the Pacific.'

In other words, the Pacific islands had all had significant contact with the outside world and long before the 1890s. Futher west, however, in the Indian Ocean the Andaman and Nicobar islands were still inhabited by people who had had little or no contact. Even at that time, the British (who nominally ruled the islands and used them primarily as a penal colony) never comprehensively explored or administered them. The 1872 assassination by an inmate of the viceroy Lord Mayo while he was inspecting the prison at Port Blair may have played a part in this approach. Today, many of the islands are still off limits to visitors, including the inhabited island of North Sentinel. As recently as 2018 a missionary attempted to go ashore and was killed by the inhabitants.