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“The Islamic world had transmitted much of Greek science to medieval Europe, and Aristotle in particular was greatly admired by Muslim scholars as “The Philosopher��. But under the influence of the clerics Islam eventually turned against reason and science as dangerous to religion, and this renaissance died out. In rather similar fashion, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian closed the philosophy schools of Athens in 529 AD because he considered them dangerous to Christianity. But while in the thirteenth century several Popes, for the same reason, tried to forbid the study of Aristotle in the universities, they were ignored and in fact by the end of the century Aquinas had been able to publish his synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology in the Summa Theologica.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“But a crucial difference between the Konso and ourselves is that we are fundamentally aware of the possibility of unbelief, of the denial of anything beyond the purely material, so that the assertion of belief in God as true in our society is not like the belief of the Konso in Waqa. In their culture there is no real awareness of the possibility of not believing in Waqa, and his reality is simply taken for granted.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“For Harari the great innovation that separated us from the apes was what he calls the Cognitive Revolution, around 70,000 years ago when we started migrating out of Africa, which he thinks gave us the same sort of modern minds that we have now. “At the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.�� Survival in that area required superb mental abilities from everyone�� (55), and “The people who carved the Stadel lion-man some 30,000 years ago had the same physical, emotional, and intellectual abilities we have�� (44). Not surprisingly, then, “We’d be able to explain to them everything we know—from the adventures of Alice in Wonderland to the paradoxes of quantum physics—and they could teach us how their people view the world�� (23). It’s a sweet idea, and something like this imagined meeting actually took place a few years ago between the linguist Daniel Everett and the Piraha foragers of the Amazon in Peru (Everett 2008). But far from being able to discuss quantum theory with them, he found that the Piraha couldn’t even count, and had no numbers of any kind.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“The killing of pigs among the Tauade was also a formal occasion, though not a sacrifice, because there was a taboo against killing one’s own pigs: “They are like our own children��, I was told, so someone else had to do it for them. This led to ceremonial killings at which speeches were made, followed by the killing of the pigs which was done by beating them over the head with the equivalent of baseball bats as they lay on the ground. The thuds of the blows, the shrieks of the dying animals, and the blood streaming from their nostrils being lapped up by the village dogs took some getting used to.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“But to refer to these nations as “Afro-Asian�� is conspicuously absurd, and the whole concept of Afro-Asia is actually meaningless from every point of view. The general idea of Eurasia, however, does make a good deal of cultural as well as ecological sense, not only because it recognises the obvious importance of Europe, but because of the cultural links that went to and fro across it, so that the early navigators of the fifteenth century were using the Chinese inventions of magnetic compasses, stern-post rudders, paper for their charts, and gunpowder, and were making their voyages to find sea-routes from Europe to China and the East Indies rather than relying on overland trade.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“My objection is supported by the fact that archaeological evidence about the origins of human culture shows that self-decoration with coloured ochre, and simple shell necklaces, only started occurring around 100,000 years ago, but even this is not symbolic behaviour. (What, for example, is the symbolic meaning of a woman’s lipstick?—nothing whatever.) The first clear evidence for symbolic culture comes from Europe about 40,000 years ago”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“Throughout the book there is also a strange vacillation between hard-nosed Darwinism and egalitarian sentiment. On one hand Harari quite justifiably mocks the humanists�� naive belief in human rights, for not realising that these rights are based on Christianity, and that a huge gulf has actually opened up between the findings of science and modern liberal ideals.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society