"At the university they had a lot of funny clichés. One of them was about how much European mathematics was indebted to ancient folk culture; just look at the pyramids, whose geometry commands respect and admiration.
This of course, is idiocy disguised as a pat on the back. Technological culture is superior in the very reality it defines. The seven to eight rules of thumb of the Egyptian surveyors is abacus mathematics compared to integral calculus.
In The Last Kings of Thule, Jean Malauri writes that a significant argument for studying the interesting Polar Eskimos is that you can thus learn something about human progression from the Neanderthal stage to the people of the Stone Age.
It's written with a certain amount of affection. But it's a study in unconscious prejudices.
Any race of people that allows itself to be graded on a scale designed by European science will appear to be a culture of higher primates.
Any grading system is meaningless. Every attempt to compare cultures with the intention of determining which is the most developed will never be anything other than one more bullshit projection of Western culture's hatred of its own shadows.
There is one way to understand another culture. Living it. Move into it, ask to be tolerated as a guest, learn the language."

Peter Høeg Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

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Harbor, Stettin, Germany [between ca. 1890 - ca. 1900 ]
LoC P&P