Imagine you live in another galaxy.

Your people are technologically advanced, but have no interest in space travel. They are, however, curious about other worlds and can zoom in on distant planets and snap a single photo of people there.

Your team takes a picture of a group of people on planet X4798Q (your designation for Earth.) The picture happens to be of some Holocaust survivors. They are horribly thin, and their clothes, which barely cover their bodies, are dirty and ragged.

Your write-up for the photo says, “The people of X4798Q are primitive. They seem to have developed no agriculture and are not successful at hunting. They stay alive—barely—by scavenging. The vacant look in their eyes suggests they neither read nor write.”

The photo and your write-up are published in scientific journals and taught in schools.

Here on Earth, an anthropologist named Allan Holmberg made a mistake similar to the one you made.

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From 1940 to 1942, Holmberg lived in Bolivia with a group of Native Americans, the Sirionó. He wrote a book about them called Nomads of the Longbow.

He described the Sirionó as “among the most culturally backward peoples of the world.” They had no clothes, no domestic animals, no art, no musical instruments. They couldn’t count beyond the number three. They couldn’t make fire. They had no religious beliefs. He concluded they were descendants of Stone Age people and were living as their ancestors had.

How amazing to discover Stone Age people and document their primitive ways! The book became a highly influential work in the field of anthropology and was often cited. It was required reading in college anthropology classes.

Holmberg died in 1966. It wasn’t until the 1980s that another anthropologist was able to visit the Sirionó. Allyn Stearman studied this backward group and discovered their history. The Sirionó were not hold-overs from the Stone Age, as Holmberg had claimed. They were a modern people who had suffered devastating disasters.

The tribe had angered white cattle ranchers. The ranchers called on the Bolivian army to keep the tribe off their lands and away from their cattle. The army began hunting the Sirionó, throwing any they captured into prison camps and making slaves of them.

Then things got worse. A series of epidemics in the 1920s wiped out almost all of the Sirionó population. The remaining members of the tribe were forced into what is called a genetic bottleneck. That is, they had no choice but to mate with relatives. This led to hereditary problems that did nothing to improve their deplorable circumstances.

By the time Holmberg lived among them, the Sirionó were indeed wretched and uncultured. His descriptions of them were accurate, but his statements about why they lived in such a primitive fashion were wrong. So wrong that in scientific circles his conclusions are now referred to as Holmberg’s Mistake.

Someday, you may take another photo of planet X4798Q and realize how unwise it is to judge others by their appearance.

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