Something that impressed me about the cultural level of the inhabitants of the large continent to the west when the whites arrived came from putting together two separate pieces of botanical information. One was a newcoined name for the plant we call plantain, arrived as a weed with Europeans, was in at least one tribe's nomenclature something like "White Man's Footstep" or "Footmark" (I can't be wholly sure about the detail): the meaning I recall, because it referred not only to the way the new plant spread where Europeans went, but also to the way it marked paths and heavily trodden areas. Not only was there sophistication of observation, though. A long time after I heard that, I heard a medicine man describing the use of plantain in medicine. That means that, after the Europeans arrived, there was active investigation of the effects of plants of which there could be no ancestral knowledge. That's "civilised".

Penny