“There is,” says Georg, “no part of the body that has not been perfected, decorated, dis- figured, painted, bleached, tattooed, reformed, stretched or squeezed, out of vanity or desire for ornament.”
Quoted in Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.5, Section III, 1935
"Clothing was apparently, in its origins, a form of ornament, a sexual deterrent or charm rather than an article of use against cold or shame. The Cimbri were in the habit of tobogganing naked over the snow. When Darwin, pitying the nakedness of the Fuegians, gave one of them a red cloth as a protection against the cold, the native tore it into strips, which he and his companions then used as ornaments; as Cook had said of them, tunelessly, they were “content to be naked, but ambitious to be fine.” In like manner the ladies of the Orinoco cut into shreds the materials given them by the Jesuit Fathers for clothing; they wore the ribbons so made around their necks, but insisted that “they would be ashamed to wear clothing.” An old author describes the Brazilian natives as usually naked, and adds: “Now alreadie some doe weare apparell, but esteem it so little that they weare it rather for fashion than for honesties sake, and because they are commanded to weare it; ... as is well seene by some that some times come abroad with certaine garments no further than the navell, without any other thing, or others onely a cap on their heads, and leave the other garments at home.” When clothing became something more than an adornment it served partly to indicate the married status of a loyal wife, partly to accentuate the form and beauty of woman. For the most part primitive women asked of clothing precisely what later women have asked— not that it should quite cover their nakedness, but that it should enhance or suggest their charms. Everything changes, except woman and man."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.5, Section III, 1935
"From the dance, we may believe, came instrumental music and the drama. The making of such music appears to arise out of a desire to mark and accentuate with sound the rhythm of the dance, and to intensify with shrill or rhythmic notes the excitement necessary to patriotism or procreation. The instruments were limited in range and accomplishment, but almost endless in variety: native ingenuity exhausted itself in fashioning horns, trumpets, gongs, tamtams, clappers, rattles, castanets, flutes and drums from horns, skins, shells, ivory, brass, copper, bamboo and wood; and it ornamented them with elaborate carving and coloring. The taut string of the bow became the origin of a hundred instruments from the primitive lyre to the Stradivarius violin and the modern pianoforte. Professional singers, like professional dancers, arose among the tribes; and vague scales, predominantly minor in tone, were developed.
With music, song and dance combined, the “savage” created for us the drama and the opera. [...]"
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.5, Section III, 1935 (italics added)
"In these ways precivilized men created the forms and bases of civilization. Looking backward upon this brief survey of primitive culture, we find every element of civilization except writing and the state. All the modes of economic life are invented for us here: hunting and fishing, herd- ing and tillage, transport and building, industry and commerce and finance. All the simpler structures of political life are organized: the clan, the family, the village community, and the tribe; freedom and order— those hostile foci around which civilization revolves— find their first adjustment and reconciliation; law and justice begin. The fundamentals of morals are established: the training of children, the regulation of the sexes, the inculcation of honor and decency, of manners and loyalty. The bases of religion are laid, and its hopes and terrors are applied to the encouragement of morals and the strengthening of the group. Speech is developed into complex languages, medicine and surgery appear, and modest beginnings are made in science, literature and art. All in all it is a picture of astonishing creation, of form rising out of chaos, of one road after another being opened from the animal to the sage. Without these “savages,” and their hundred thou- sand years of experiment and groping, civilization could not have been. We owe almost everything to them— as a fortunate, and possibly degenerate, youth inherits the means to culture, security and ease through the long toil of an unlettered ancestry."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.5, Section III, 1935
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