What is meant is that the chief key to the progress of certain
peoples, the arrest of progress in others, and the entire absence
of progress in others, is the study of their relations with, or
isolation from, other peoples. They make progress chiefly
according to the amount of stimulation they get by contact with a
diverse culture.
Let us see if this furnishes a broad explanation of the position
of the various peoples of the world. The Ethnologist tells us
that the lowest peoples of the earth are the Yahgans of Tierra
del Fuego, the Hottentots, a number of little-understood peoples
in Central Africa, the wild Veddahs of Ceylon, the (extinct)
Tasmanians, the Aetas in the interior of the Philippines, and
certain fragments of peoples on islands of the Indian Ocean.
There is not the least trace of a common element in the
environment of these peoples to explain why they have remained at
the level of primitive humanity. Many of them lived in the most
promising and resourceful surroundings. What is common to them
all is their isolation from the paths of later humanity. They
represent the first wave of human distribution, pressed to the
tips of continents or on islands by later waves, and isolated.
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