There are many things that set the Aboriginal people who lived here before my people apart from my people.
One thing is the rampant consumer culture.
I can, apparently, never be happy with what I have. I have to have "the latest" - the app, the Windows 10 upgrade, new sneakers, designer sunglasses, and always more, more, more...
They thought differently, they saw the world differently. They reached the "level of development" that they did, and stayed there.
Their culture didn't force it down their throats that they should have ten tons of useless bric a brac, and if they didn't, that they were in some way useless, poor, defective, deficient because they didn't burden themselves with the unnecessary trappings that they "must have".
They lived a "low technology" hunter gatherer lifestyle, and from all accounts did it remarkably successfully. They are the longest surviving culture in the world, they must have got something right...
They weren't miserable, they weren't unhappy, they weren't bedraggled and half starved, scratching out a life from one painful day to the next (unlike people in my culture who live under the burden of mounting debt that they'll never escape, simply because they are victims of a rampant consumer culture. "Must have! Must have!").
Yes, I agree, they were stone age "primitives". No, I don't agree that because their lifestyle was so very different from mine that they were in some way lesser human beings.
They were different, but that doesn't mean they weren't people, remarkable, admirable people.
So they don't meet 21st Century "expectations" of "civilisation"?
No, maybe they didn't have farms, but they didn't have oil wells, and islands of waste plastic choking the oceans, either.
Are we so good that we can thumb our noses at them? Are we really so "advanced" as a "culture"?
Just because they lived in a different way doesn't give us grounds to put ourselves on a pedestal, give ourselves airs, think ourselves better.
The defining word is Different.
Not better.
They were people, in many ways just like us. In many ways not like us.
The one thing we cannot escape is that they too were, are, people.
Primitive, Civilised, it's a matter of perspective.
