But it is hard to ignore the obvious problems that arise when adjudicating the cognitive sophistication of a people based mainly on the kinds of things they made. After all, many indigenous people the world over were until recently deemed subhuman by others on the basis of their simple material culture, none more so than Tasmanian Aboriginals in the eighteenth century, who were such efficient foragers that they acquired all the food they needed using a set of tools so basic that they would make a Homo erectus hand-ax look like cutting-edge technology.
