Hypothetical Early Groups before Totemism.
But, discarding this old philological hypothesis, how did the pristine groups get their totem-names? We ought first to try to conjecture what these pristine groups were like. They must have varied in various environments. Where the sea or a large lake yields an abundant food supply, men are likely to have assembled in considerable numbers, as "kitchen middens" show, at favourable stations. In great woods and jungles the conditions of food supply are not the same as in wide steppes and prairies, especially in the uniform and arid plateaux of Central Australia. Rivers, like seas and lakes, are favourable to settlement, steppes make nomadism inevitable, before the rise of agriculture. But if the earliest groups were mutually hostile, strongly resenting any encroachment on their region of food supply, the groups would necessarily be small; as in Mr. Darwin's theory of small pristine groups, the male, with his females, daughters, and male sons not adult.[1] A bay, or inlet, or a good set of pools and streams, would be appropriated and watchfully guarded by a group, just as every area of Central Australia has its recognised native owners, who wander about it, feeding on grubs, lizards, snakes, rats, frogs, grass seeds, roots, emus, kangaroos, and opossums.
The pristine groups, we may be allowed to conjecture, were small. If they were not, die hypotheses which I venture to present are of no value, while that of Mr. Atkinson shares their doom. Mr. McLennan, as far as one can conjecture from the fragments of his speculations, regarded the earliest groups as at least so large, and so bereft of women, that polyandry was a general rule. Mr. Darwin, on the other hand, began with polygamy and monogamy, "jealousy determining the first stage."[2] This
