CHAPTER XX
THEORIES OF CULTURE ORIGIN
The familiar phenomenon of identity of traits among different groups of aborigines has always been treated as a serious problem. Our leading anthropologists have shown a tendency to seek the explanation for such identity in independent development rather than in diffusion, or borrowing, presumably because of the predisposition arising from experience with the highly organized military groups of Europe, where political unity is practically synonymous with cultural individuality. We have seen how this correlation also appeared among the more highly organized peoples of the New World, but was not found among the more primitive tribes where culture groups were far more inclusive than the political ones. But there is still another important factor favoring the independent origin theory: viz., Darwinism, the great influence of whose evolutionary ideas emphasized the development aspect of culture and thus gave the primitive social group an exaggerated importance.
According to the independent development theory, the unity of the human mind is sufficient to account for identities in culture wherever the environments are the same. Thus, according to this view, no matter what tribes moved into the country occupied by one of our culture centers, the environment would react on their minds in essentially the same way, suggesting the same ideas and so leading to the same inventions. One important objection to the wide application of this theory is that different peoples do not seem to arrive at the same solutions even when confronted with like conditions. Another difficulty is that similarities are found in such traits as mythological characters, social practices, etc., whose origin can not be successfully accounted for as reactions to the environment. Yet, a close view of the case shows that many
