Health Lessons From Primitive Living

World chaos as well as national and individual dilemmas impress even the most calloused that something serious is going wrong with our modern civilization. Remnants of primitive racial stocks show us clearly that we are severing the life line which is the source of all physical excellence and progressive growth in both animals and humans. Of all the many past racial stocks of man, only a few have persisted in full vigor to this day. It behooves us to study critically how these persisting racial groups have escaped the pitfalls that have overwhelmed a vast number of cultural groups and in some parts of the world are so seriously threatening ours.

In May, 1942, the British Government published a paper, entitled “Current Trends of Population in Great Britain,” covering the closing decade of the last century through the four decades of the present century. This revealed an increase in progressive decline in population of.69 per cent ranging from 1.13 per cent to 0.44 per cent. Professor F. A. E. Crew of Edinburgh has recently commented thus on the lowering birth rate in Europe: “A people’s birth rate is the measure of their faith in themselves…”

While birth rate is a very important controlling factor in population, the number of citizens may be secondary to quality in regard to significance. Population figures may mean much in national and international policies. Clearly the greatest problems which concern us relate to the health, comfort, and character of the individuals. Any decline of modern cultures, accordingly, has to do primarily with problems of individuals. Many students of modern social problems have emphasized strongly the factors that concern individuals. A few illustrations of these estimates of our modern degeneration are the following:

1. Modern man is delicate…The organism seems to have become more susceptible to degenerative diseases. (Carrel)
2. Nearly one-third of the whole population (of two dozen states) is of a type to require some supervision. (Laird)
3. It was stated in 1940 that, of 2,000,000 babies to be born in 1941 in the United States of America, 738,386 or 37 percent will be wholly or partially wasted. (National Committee for Planned Parenthood)
4. Of all the psychological causes of crime, the commonest and gravest is usually alleged to be a defective mind. (Burt)
5. Gross human congenital malformations arise solely from influences which affect the germ cells prior to fertilization. (Murphy)
6. Eggs (fertilized ova) are not all of equal quality: 25 per cent are not good enough to be born as living individuals. (Streeter)
7. It is store food which has given us store teeth. (Hooton)
8. There is a nutritional basis for modern physical, mental, and moral degeneration. (Price)

Modern science has revealed that both cultural growth and race detecting are the results of biologic processes. We have clear indications that an intimate study of the activities of remnants of primitive racial stocks that have persisted through many centuries can reveal what these stocks have done that less successful cultures have failed to do. On this basis, I have sought out and studied remnants of fourteen primitive racial stocks in various parts of the world, both where they are still protected by their isolation and where they live in various stages of modernization. The studies have been made on both levels–primitive and modern–in order to throw light upon the factors contributing to growth or breakdown of the different levels.

As we think of human racial groups in our changing environments, we find an essential difference between man and the lower animals in that the latter are motivated entirely by forces that are inherent at birth and which we classify broadly under the term instinct or inherited wisdom. As man has learned ways of modifying and controlling his environment, he not only has lost much of the need for inherited wisdom; but he has also developed a greatly reduced capacity for transferring and utilizing it. In his primitive state, he, like the animals about him, has little choice other than to follow his instinctive wisdom and tribal customs, which make imperative his adaptation to that environment which has been competent to produce and maintain him in it, just as it has many other forms of animal life.

In selecting the remnants of primitive racial stocks for this study, I have put much emphasis on a wide range of physical environments as determined by their location, including groups from the bleak Arctic to the humid equatorial jungles, and groups from high mountain habitations to ocean levels in various latitudes. Since the primary problem has been to learn the nature of the forces underlying our modern expressions of degeneration, I have selected groups providing illustrations of varying degrees of modernization as resulting from contact with our modern white race and the foods of its commerce.

Two outstanding groups of changes have been encountered: first, those that relate to individuals; and second, those that relate to families. The latter have been associated with marked changes in the physical characteristics of the groups, including a passing from a quite uniform physical type to a wide variety of individual physical patterns. An outstanding and constant factor associated with both these individual and group (or family) characteristics has been their association with a change from the particular native type of nutrition provided by the given physical environment to the foods of our modern commerce which include the highly refined and processed foods, many of which have been more or less largely demineralized and devitalized to make them available for shipping. It is of special importance that both the individual and family characteristic changes have been similar for all of these racial groups. Of equally great significance is the fact that they have been similar to those that obtain in modernized groups that are degenerating in America and Europe.

Important phases of the field study have been the gathering of samples of foods and the shipping of these samples to my laboratories in Cleveland for chemical analysis. The analyses have disclosed a wide range of food substances dependent upon the climatic conditions controlling them. Notwithstanding the wide variations in kind of foods, the ultimate content of the various foods was made up of substances essential for body building and repair in adequate quantity. The foods from all of the different menus had been selected in accordance with the accumulated wisdom of the various groups. Since the displacing foods of commerce are relatively the same for all of these groups, there is available from these studies a clear indication that the human body reacts similarly regardless of its color and habitation.

Because we are primarily concerned with the forces involved in the degeneration of our masses, and since the forces of degeneration are closely associated with a second group of forces, namely, those causing structural changes within the family group, the writer will concentrate attention on disclosing causes of structural changes.

One of the striking impressions a person experiences in studying individuals in an isolated group is the physical similarity in facial form and body build of the various individuals. The impression is similar to that made by a very large family of brothers and sisters. Indeed, this similarity is found to obtain in the members living on widely separated islands, as for example, in the cases of Melanesians and Polynesians of the Pacific. An illustration of this is given in Figure 1 which presents photographs of four Melanesian boys. There is a striking similarity in the faces of the four; and for the anthropologist there is marked evidence of a quite uniform skeletal development. From the teeth, the only visible part of the skeleton, one can discover the arrangement and development of the maxillary and mandibular bones of the face. The arrangement and development were model types in every case. An outstanding feature of all of the primitive racial groups selected for this study was that where the people were still protected from modernization by their isolation all dental arches were broad and symmetrical, a condition which did not obtain in succeeding generations of the modernized groups.

The Melanesian boys pictured in Fig. 1 live on islands widely separated, but their parents had been able to reproduce individuals of a highly uniform type.

Fig. 1. These four Melanesian boys, born on different islands. look like brothers, but are not blood relations. They illustrate the role of heredity in reproducing racial type.

 

I made studies on eight archipelagos of Pacific Islands and found striking similarities of countenance for each racial group wherever the group was still protected by isolation from the foods of commerce. At the ports of some of the larger islands where ships of commerce had been making regular call for several years, marked changes were found in the recently born members of even pure racial stocks. Indeed, it was most striking to find these physical changes of the face occurring in the children of parents who themselves were completely free from change. It is very difficult for us in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, who are so used to seeing a very wide variety of facial forms in any large group of individuals and even in a large family, to appreciate the thrill it gives one to be in a group where there is so complete uniformity of facial forms as there is in many of these isolated groups. Another striking impression is made when one finds two contrasted groups, namely, one in which all members have broad dental arches and well-developed bodies and faces, and another in which the individuals have a variety of divergent facial patterns, such as those we are used to seeing in our modernized cities. Instead of well-balanced harmony in the many structures that make up the face, we see individuals with any of the following divergencies: (1) the face long and narrow; (2) the middle third of the face settled inward; (3) the chin too short for the rest of the face; (4) both the middle and lower third of the face underdeveloped in proportion to the crown; (5) or the face typical of mouth breathers. Any or all of these facial patterns are likely to be associated with so-called crooked teeth, that is, teeth relatively normal in size, but teeth for which the arch is too small. Deformities in the arrangement of the teeth may be of this type: the upper front teeth may go inside the lower front teeth instead of lapping outside, (which is normal); the upper lateral incisors may be inside the line of the arch; or the upper cuspids or lower cuspids or both may be well outside their arch because there is no room in the arch for them. The teeth may be rotated in their sockets. The impression given when the upper front teeth go inside the lowers is that the chin is too prominent.

We are particularly concerned with the nature of the forces that have brought about these marked physical changes in order to understand what we see illustrated in the faces in almost any American schoolroom of children, particularly in the faces of pupils of teen age.

There is an almost universal opinion current to effect that the explanation for these changes in facial structure is to be found in the normal operation of the laws of heredity through the mixing of racial stocks in different types. It has been supposed and taught that the crooked teeth were the result of faulty breathing habits, thumb or finger-sucking, or bad positions when sleeping. One explanation that is very common is that the boy or girl with the deformed face or crooked teeth has face and teeth like one of the parents or grandparents, which result is supposed to be precisely what would have to occur according to the laws of heredity.

In order to demonstrate that the condition is due to intercepted heredity rather than to heredity, I made a special study of the children of parents who had not had any of these expressions of deformity of facial form and whose parents had not had these deformities. The United States, while being a melting pot, has still many immigrants living who were born in various districts in Europe where these deformities were not current. It is very important that we should keep an open mind and not assume, because we have not observed what is very apparent all about us, that it does not exist. The need for this open-mindedness will be strikingly illustrated later when we study succeeding members of individual families. If this problem were one of heredity, it could not occur in extreme form and variety of patterns in the first generation after an ancestral line had changed so simple a factor in its environment as nutrition. In a study of over twelve hundred skulls of the Chimu culture on the coast of South America, I did not find a single skull with any of these typical divergency patterns in the arrangement of the bones of the face and teeth. These skulls were those of people who had died and had been buried hundreds of years ago in the dry sands of the arid coastal region where the shores are bathed by the Humboldt current which abounds in a variety of sea food which food makes normal heredity possible. Among the moderns living there, large numbers, and indeed in many communities a large percentage, of the children of teen age showed these divergency patterns. Some of these children were reported to be of pure Chimu stock. 

In the upper view in Figure II, we see a father and son of the Chimu culture. The father has the splendidly developed features of that stock. His dental arches are wide, and the facial bones well developed. At the right is his son. He apparently is of as pure blood stock as his parents. Something serious has happened in that environment which has made for conspicuous changes in the facial patterns for the large group of children of teen age belonging to the native colony of the International Oil Company resident at Talara, northern Peru. The reason I am at pains to refer to the deformity of the children of the early teen age is that the full expression of these facial deformity changes is only seen with the development of the adult face and its permanent dentition. The deformities may occur even in the deciduous arch. When they do, however, the condition is usually more aggravated with the eruption of the second teeth and the development of the adult face.

Fig. 2. The change in facial and dental arch form made in a single generation is indicated in the pictures above showing a coastal Indian and his son from Peru. In the pictures below, changes from a father to a son are indicated for Indians of the high Andes. These are cases which show by contrast the results of disturbed hereditary patterns caused by faulty nutrition of parents.

 

Another of the facial stocks extending back many centuries in history is that of the luca culture of the high Andes of South America, both the Aymara and Quichua groups. In the lower part of Figure II, we see a father from near Cuzco in the high Andes, who shows the splendid facial form and typical design of the members of this tribe. The same facial pattern is also evidenced in the splendid collections of skulls in the various museums and recent excavations in this region. At the lower right, is shown this Inca’s son, who, notwithstanding all the impacts of preceding generations, shows a marked divergence from the tribal patterns of face and dental arch. Some powerful force other than that of hereditary influence and Mendelian laws has been operative to overcome heredity. The power of this inhibiting force is emphasized by the constancy of the response to it of humans of different races in different parts of the world. 

For brevity, I will show in Figure III one common type of dental arch deformity which is associated with the depression of the lateral incisors and undue prominence of the cuspids. This deformity may be noted in Picture A, of a modernized Eskimo girl; in B, of a modernized North Canada Indian boy; in C, of a modernized Polynesian: in D, of an East Indian at Monibasa: in E, of a Negro in Belgian Congo, and in F, of an Arab of Khartoum. Similar illustrations were obtained in various tribes in process of modernization, including Australian Aborigines, New Zealand Maori. Malay races, north of Australia, Africans, and indeed many European groups such as Gaelics, Italians, and Swiss.

Fig. 3. Among modernized primitives, many dental arch deformity partners develop similar to common deformities in Europe and America. In this deformity pattern the upper laterals develop inside the line of the arch. The upper arch is narrowed and the cuspids develop outside the arch. A, Eskimo; B, North Canada Indian; C, Polynesian, South Sea Island; D, East Indian, Mombasa; E, Negro, Belgian Congo; F. Arab, Khartoum.

 

This problem of facial change is so generally associated with the various processes of so-called modernization that it appears in probably 40 per cent of the families in the United States and Canada where there are several children. We can often use our own families to illustrate the operation of the force by comparing younger members of the family with older members. In many districts this condition is present in a majority of the families. 

The two boys in the center of Figure IV are Australian Aborigines who were living on a reservation where the food is supplied almost entirely by the dominant white race. The first child born before the parents were brought into the reservation is shown at the left. He is a handsome boy with facial and dental arch design characteristic of the tribe. His brother at the right was born a few years later after the parents had been living on the foods of commerce as supplied by the white man. Note how the lateral teeth are depressed inward and the arch narrowed. These conditions indicate the nature of the changes in the bony supports for these teeth, namely, the maxillary and premaxillary bones. In the lower view in Figure IV, there is portrayed, at the left, the fourth child born in this family before the white man’s store was established on the Island of Badu, which was twenty-three years before my visit to the Island. These Islands were under a mandate to Australia. This man looks like his three older brothers and like the Malay stock to which he belongs. His brother at the right is one of three born after the white man’s store was put on the Island. All three have long and narrow faces. It is important that this boy has a narrow and deformed dental arch.

Fig. 4. Typical degeneration in younger members of same family. Above. Maori, New Zealand; center, Aborigines, Australia; below. Micronesian, Island north of Australia. This condition of lowered reproductive capacity of parents, though unrecognized, is very, very common in America. 

 

While the illustrations so far used have been directly related to the facial and dental arch patterns, it is important to note that other structures of the body have undergone important changes at the same time, some of which are very far reaching in their effect on modern living conditions. This is particularly true of the hips. Data have frequently been presented indicating progressive increase in the height of girls in women’s colleges in America during recent decades. This has been interpreted as evidence of an improvement in body structure. It is of special importance that we recognize that in a large percentage of American families the younger daughters are taller and narrower, but not healthier, than the first born child when a girl. One of the striking and indeed very unfortunate guides to modern ideals and standards among girls is the slender boyish figure of the dancer displayed as typical of perfect form in the motion pictures and theaters of today. Girls consider these dancers as being ideal in body design and think of their own body form as not being so beautiful because not so slender and narrow in the hips, without appreciating the fact that the so-called models are themselves the deformities and represent types that should certainly be avoided. 

Surely the public school, particularly the high school, should be able to re-orient the thinking along a more sane line necessary for race perpetuation. Indeed, one of the most fortunate experiences that could come to modern educators and social workers would be to obtain exact knowledge of the vast difference and case with which reproduction is carried out among adequately built human beings, as evidenced by experiences of mothers in primitive racial groups, in contrast with experiences of many mothers in modernized groups–served by maternity hospitals.

The significance of the race perpetuation problem may be ignored, but its importance cannot thereby be dismissed. While it is exceedingly important that we shall know the facts that I have enumerated, they avail us little unless we understand how serious racial injuries are produced and how they can be prevented. I stated earlier that the expressions of degeneration could be considered in two large groups; first, those that occur directly to the individual because of inadequate nutrition; and second, those that develop in the offspring due to faulty nutrition of the parents. This discussion has been limited to injuries of the second group. Space will not permit in this presentation an extended discussion of the first group of injuries which would include dental caries or tooth decay, which is recognized as the most universal disease afflicting modernized American and European groups. 

It is important to observe, however, that in the light of our present knowledge dental caries is a nutritional problem and as such can be both prevented and controlled. Only one tooth per hundred teeth of the primitive groups studied had been attacked by dental caries; whereas, after changing from the native nutrition to foods of commerce, from 30 per cent to 60 per cent of teeth were carious. Similarly, the majority of modern degenerative diseases, non-epidemic, affecting humanity today are recognized as resulting from nutritional deficiencies of the individual. 

We are, in the light of such statistical evidence on degeneration, concerned with the nature of the forces at work which would produce changes in body structure and design and their extent. Fortunately, much light is available on this phase of the subject as a result of clinical experience and animal experimentation. Since domestic animals contribute so important a part to the national welfare, interference with their development becomes a national problem. During recent years, there have been several periods of drought extending over large areas of the middle western states. During the periods of drought there have been born a large number of defective animals. Among the physical defects noted are cleft palate, harelip, spinal bifida, club feet, cauliflower ears, and even blindness. It is reported that in some flocks as high as 50 per cent of the lambs had to be destroyed because of deformities. A direct effect of the absence of rain has been the absence of chlorophyll in the pasturage and the resultant shortage of carotene which is a precursor of vitamin A. 

Among the many observations that were made was the testing of the effect of reducing the quantity of vitamin A in the food of the parents prior to and at the time gestation occurred. In one experiment made by Professor Fred Hale, six mother pigs, that were later to be used for breeding, were deprived of vitamin A in their food for several months before mating and continued on that feed for thirty days after mating. There were born to these six mother pigs 59 young, not one of which had normal eyeballs. Indeed the eyeballs did not develop. Many of the pigs had one or more of the following: blindness, cleft palate, harelip, spinal bifida, or club feet. Since eyeballs require vitamin A for their development and even for the carriers of the germ cells reproducing eyes, these growth processes could not occur in these animals. That this was not heredity was very easily demonstrated by the fact that when certain of these blind and deformed young were reared to normal age for reproduction on a normal diet, their offspring were relatively normal, all having eyes and all having normal palates, facial bones, and skeletal structure. 

A still further test was made. If this condition were due to heredity, a mother that had produced a litter with these defects would have to repeat with the same type of offspring if she were mated to her own blood son. When this was done with proper nutrition for both, all of the offspring were normal.

It probably is all too common that when a deformed child is born the mother is blamed. Now data are being developed showing that the father may be the carrier of the defective germ cells. 

For example, in one instance in the case of a dog, four litters were born, all sired by the same dog. In each litter, pups were born with cleft palate and serious spinal deformity. The evidence indicates that the sire in this case was the carrier of the defective germ cells. 

Probably no problem of modern educational systems is more important to society than the progressively increasing size of the classes for backward children and those with disturbed personalities. Indeed, delinquency has come to be one of the outstanding social problems of today. It has not been understood or even suspected that a very large proportion of the backward and socially maladjusted children are primarily the product of an ignorant society in producing parents utterly unprepared and untutored regarding the requisites for during racial perfection and national character.

It is of special interest to educators that backward and delinquent individuals appear in unduly large proportion in later-born children in the family. Similarly, statistics have shown that more of the Rhodes Scholars are of first-boy rank in the family than of any other birth rank. 

The data here presented have emphasized the fact that disturbances in the structure adjoining the brain, particularly those of the maxillary bones and dental arches are significant. Tredgold of England has recognized two sources of brain injury which he has described as “germinal blight” and “arrest” due to poisoning of the germ cells. He further states: 

“Palate–The association of abnormalities of the palate with mental deficiency has long been recognized, and there is no doubt that it is one of the commonest malformations occurring in this condition. Petersen, who has made a most exhaustive study of this question, and has compiled an elaborate classification of the various anomalies, found palatal deformities present in no less than 82 per cent of aments (mental defectives), in 76 per cent of epileptics, and in 80 per cent of the insane.”

It is a most significant fact that modern delinquents and maladjusted individuals and criminals practically all show a very high percentage of disturbances of both mentality and development of the head and face bones, particularly of the palates. 

Hooton, of Harvard, in his elaborate investigation, Crime and the Man, concludes as a result of his studies of 15,000 criminals in ten states the following: “On the whole, the biological superiority of the civilian to the delinquent is quite as certain as his sociological superiority.”

Probably no problem the teacher has is more hopeless and bewildering than a struggle to teach a child with a defective mind. It is not fair that she be considered responsible for providing a normal response in a child with a defective brain. 

While it is not possible to identify criminals or the degree of social maladjustment by looking at a photograph of an individual, is a matter of very great importance, however, on the basis of the data I have been presenting that in a study of the inmates of our institutions for delinquents and criminals a very large percentage of them is seen at once to have the stigmata that I have been reviewing. Probably the gravest problem in our modern social organization has to do with character degeneration as a direct accompaniment and result of incomplete brain organization due primarily to faulty nutrition of the parents prior to and at the time of conception. 

What could be more tragic than a modern culture that takes pride in, even boasts of its superior wisdom, and yet does not recognize fundamental laws of life and national growth which so many of the primitive races not only understand, but have definite programs for developing. These primitive groups had as a controlling motive in life the concept that they were a part of the great universe, Nature, and that in order to live successfully and efficiently, they must know and obey its commands. Not only their religion, but their systems of education for their children, were built around and based upon detailed information essential for the needs of the individuals living and for the rights of the unborn. It is a thrilling experience to go among some of these primitive racial stocks and find that today they not only have definite nutritional programs which they teach their children to follow. but programs which parents must use in anticipation of their offspring. 

Ernest Thompson Seton in his book, The Gospel of The Red Man, has summed up the controlling motives of the two groups, the modern whites and the American Indians, as follows:

“The culture and civilization of the White man are essentially material; his measure of success is, ‘How much property have I acquired for myself?’ The culture of the Red man is fundamentally spiritual; his measure of success is, ‘How much service have I rendered to my people?’”

It is fortunate for the members of the modern white race that at least they can know why they are disappearing from the scene. Whether they have the wisdom or enough strength of character to reorient their lives and regenerate society in harmony with the fundamental laws of life on the earth is another matter. The remnants of primitive racial stocks could readily be adapted by Nature to take the place of civilized peoples on the world stage, if the modern white race continues to make a failure of the art of living in Nature’s garden. They could, however, teach our modern declining race the way back to harmony with Nature. 

Since so much of modern interpretation of behavior in individual and racial quality has been based upon misapprehension regarding heredity and its limitations and an inadequate knowledge and teaching of the biologic laws of life, the one hope for continuance of our modern white race seems based upon a re-orientation. The dilemmas of our highly modernized groups which arise from faulty nutrition of the individual or his parents are not insurmountable. If, like our all-out war effort, we will determine to reorient in harmony with Nature’s biologic laws of life, it is probably not so much a question of can we do it as one of will we do it. 

One of our modern tendencies is that of selecting the foods we like, particularly those that satisfy our hunger without our having to eat much; another is that of thinking in terms of the few known vitamins and their effects. The primitive tendency seems to have been to provide an adequate factor of safety for all emergencies by the selection of sufficient variety and quantity of the various natural foods to prevent most of our modern afflictions. The success of the primitives demonstrates the fact that their nutritional program is superior to ours. An important advance in modern international relationships provides for exchange of professorships and thus, interchange of wisdom. We have shown a most laudable and sympathetic interest in carrying our culture to the remnants of these primitive races. Would it not be fortunate to accept in exchange lessons from their accumulated knowledge? It may be not only our greatest opportunity, but our best hope, for stemming the tide of our progressive breakdown and also for making possible our return to harmony with Nature’s laws, since life in its fullness is Nature obeyed.

 

Editor’s note: Since the era in which this article was written, society’s understanding of respectful terminology when referring to ethnic and cultural groups has evolved, and some readers may be offended by references to “primitive” people and other out-of-date terminology. However, this article has been archived as a historical document, and so we have chosen to use Price’s exact words in the interest of authenticity.  No disrespect to any cultural or ethnic group is intended.