>This is very half-assed speculation which I'm not at all sure of (warning!), but it may be that pre-literate societies, dependent on memory for transmitting ideas and information, tend to be very slow to change their world-views, etc., because one can easily get confused between what one remembered one's elders said and the new ideas one thought of oneself.
Stone age people invented religion, to overcome this difficulty. Its a brilliant idea.
We might even speculate that this invention, this ability to form a distinct society with a rich and slowly growing heritage of dogmatically transmitted knowledge and customs was what gave homo sapiens the critical edge over other forms of human. This ability to increment our understanding and technology from one generation to the next, relying entirely on oral transmission.
No-one's knocking our stone-age grand-parents. They were brilliant.
> So they tend to be very "conformist." Whereas, once writing is pretty well developed and folks start writing down religious/metaphysical materials, they can put new ideas in separate documents from the ones containing the traditional ones.
Of course new ideas that are not immediately incorporated into the established social order (as represented by the established religion of the society) would also have simply disappeared without trace. So stone age people would not have enjoyed any heritage of non-conformism. Non-conformists would have been at an enormous disadvantage, they would have had to start from scratch, even to the extent of each needing to re-invent the very concept of non-conformism!
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas