With Darwinism I mean what in Hamlet's Mill is eloquently described (pp. 68-74) thus (and I will only quote brief segments):

"Our period may some day be called the Darwinian period, just as we talk of the Newtonian period of two centuries ago. The simple idea of evolution, which it is no longer thought necessary to examine, spreads like a tent over all those ages that lead from primitivism into civilization. Gradually, we are told, step by step, men produced the arts and crafts, this and that, until they emerged into the light of history.

Those soporific words 'gradulally' and 'step by step', repeated incessantly, are aimed at covering an ignorance which is both vast and surprising. One should like to inquire; which steps? But then one is lulled, overwhelmed and stupified by the gradualness of it all, which is at best a platitude, only good for pacifying the mind, since no one is willing to imagine that civilization appeared in a thunderclap ...

Human history taken as a whole ... even raciation itself, is only an evolutionary episode. In that whole, Cro-Magnon man is the last link. All of prehistory is a last-minute flickering ...

Those key words (gradualness and evolution) come from the earth sciences in the first place, where they had a precise meaning. Crystallization and upthrust, erosion and geosynclinals are the result of forces acting constantly in accordance with physical laws. They provided the backdrop for Dawin's great scenario.

When it comes to the evolution of life, the terms become less precise in meaning, though still acceptable. Genetics and natural selection stand for natural law, and events are determined by the rolling of the dice over long ages. But we cannot say much about the why and the how of this instead of that specific form, about where species, types, cultures branched off. Animal evolution remains an overall historical hypothesis supported by sufficient data - and by the lack of any alternative. In detail, it raises an appalling number of questions to which we have no answer. Our ignorance remains vast, but it is not surpising ...

For if we stopped to think, we would agree that as far as human 'fate' is concerned organic evolution ceased before the time when history, or even prehistory, began. We are on another time scale ...

In later centuries historians may declare all of us insane, because this incredible blunder was not detected at once and was not refuted with adequate determination. Mistaking cultural history for a process of gradual evolution, we have deprived ourselves of every reasonable insight into the nature of culture. It goes without saying that the still more modern habit of replacing 'culture' by 'society' has blocked the last narrow path to understanding history ..."

I accuse Barthel of this 'insanity'. Look how he describes the people who created Manuscript E:

"The author of Ms. E made an attempt to number the place names from 1 to 60, but he made several mistakes: he corrected names in a continuous numbering, skipped over some numbers, and listed others twice. It is obvious that he was attempting to construct a list of sixty names to guarantee that those numbers considered important by the Easter Islanders - three, six, ten, and thirty (Barthel 1962a) - were accomodated ..." (Barthel 2, p. 75)

A Mongolian herdsman on his horse was asked if it was not very monotonous to sit there day after day doing nothing more than watching over his herd. The surprising answer was the he enjoyed it because he had time to think and he thought a lot.

I imagine the 'old ones' (korohua) on Easter Island also had a lot of free time:

"Pua Ara Hoa was the central figure among the korohua, a group of old Easter Islanders, who during the second decade of this century were the last living eyewitnesses of the pre-missionary era and who spent their time discussing among themselves the indigenous traditions, which had fallen into disregard among the younger Easter Islanders ...

The korohua were not all lepers; sometimes healthy old men voluntarily moved to the leper station because they felt out of place in Hangaroa, where people no longer showed any interest in things of the past (TP:7). This exodus led to the unequal distribution of knowledge about the pre-missionary era among the Easter Islanders." (Barthel 2, pp. 297-298)