on, and sun worship originate independently in ancient Egypt and in the Andean highlands and in Yucatn or did these traits originate in Egypt and diffuse from there to the Americas, as some anthropologists have believed? Some schools of ethnological theory have held to one view, some, to another. The 19th-century classical evolutionists (which included Edward Burnett Tylor and Lewis H. Morgan, among others) held that the mind of man is so constituted or endowed that he will develop cultures everywhere along the same lines. "Diffusionists"--those, such as Fritz Graebner and Elliot Smith, who offered grand theories about the diffusion of traits all over the world--maintained that man was inherently uninventive and that culture, once created, tended to spread everywhere. Each school tended to insist that its view was the correct one, and it would continue to hold that view unless definite proof of the contrary could be adduced.The tendency nowadays is not to side categorically with one school as against another but to decide each case on its own merits. The consensus with regard to pyramids is that they were developed independently in Egypt and the Americas because they differ markedly in structure and function: the Egyptian pyramids were built of stone blocks and contained tombs within their interiors. The American pyramids were constructed of earth, then faced with stone, and they served as the bases of temples. The verdict with regard to the bow and arrow is that it was invented only once and subsequently diffused to all regions where it has been found. The probable antiquity of the origin of fire making, however, and the various ways of generating it--by percussion, friction, compression (fire pistons)--indicate multiple origins. EvolutionEvolution of culture--that is, the development of forms through time--has taken place. No amount of diffusion of picture writing could of itself, for instance, produce the alphabetic system of writing...
