Societies without writing are often considered to be static, traditional, handing down their culture from generation to generation. That idea has been encouraged by many anthropologists who have seen the ‘ethnographic present’ as describing a culture fixed by unchanging custom. It is an idea often supported by the ‘natives’ themselves. ‘The world is always as it was’, the German anthropologist Franz Boas was told by the Eskimos, as if to deny the very notion of history. History, the scholar of literature Ian Watt and I argued, began with the written word. It was the printers, Franklin declared, who put us in ­perpetual motion. And we moderns are accustomed to a world that is ever-changing.

However, the traditional world according to Weber is static, unchanging to Braudel. Wallerstein sees the incessant search for change, for profit, as being the defining feature of capitalism (a notion derived from Rostow). Whereas traditional societies are governed by custom, not by rationality, and each generation accepts unquestioningly what its predecessor had laid down. How far is this true of earlier societies? There are certain segments where change, especially material change, is slow, in agriculture for example. That is why the societies remain ‘primitive’. But even here, change takes place over time, in the shape of a hand axe, in the creation of auxiliary tools. But there are other areas of social life where change is much more in evidence.